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The fragile nature of quantum circuits is a major bottleneck to scalable quantum applications. Operating at cryogenic temperatures, quantum circuits are highly vulnerable to amplifier backaction and external noise. Non-reciprocal microwave devices such as circulators and isolators are used for this purpose. These devices have a considerable footprint in cryostats, limiting the scalability of quantum circuits. We present a compact microwave diode architecture, which exploits the non-linearity of a superconducting flux qubit. At the qubit degeneracy point we experimentally demonstrate a significant difference between the power levels transmitted in opposite directions. The observations align with the proposed theoretical model. At -99 dBm input power, and near the qubit-resonator avoided crossing region, we report the transmission rectification ratio exceeding 90% for a 50 MHz wide frequency range from 6.81 GHz to 6.86 GHz, and over 60% for the 250 MHz range from 6.67 GHz to 6.91 GHz. The presented architecture is compact, and easily scalable towards multiple readout channels, potentially opening up diverse opportunities in quantum information, microwave read-out and optomechanics., Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures

The differences in brain dynamics across human subjects, commonly referred to as human artifacts, have long been a challenge in the field, severely limiting the generalizability of brain dynamics recognition models. Traditional methods for human artifact removal typically employ spectrum filtering or blind source separation, based on simple prior distribution assumptions, which ultimately constrain the capacity to model each subject's domain variance. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to model human artifact removal as a generative denoising process, capable of simultaneously generating and learning subject-specific domain variance and invariant brain signals. We introduce the Domain Specific Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DS-DDPM), which decomposes the denoising process into subject domain variance and invariant content at each step. By incorporating subtle constraints and probabilistic design, we formulate domain variance and invariant content into orthogonal spaces and further supervise the domain variance with a subject classifier. This method is the first to explicitly separate human subject-specific variance through generative denoising processes, outperforming previous methods in two aspects: 1) DS-DDPM can learn more accurate subject-specific domain variance through domain generative learning compared to traditional filtering methods, and 2) DS-DDPM is the first approach capable of explicitly generating subject noise distribution. Comprehensive experimental results indicate that DS-DDPM effectively alleviates domain distribution bias for cross-domain brain dynamics signal recognition.

Proton pump inhibitors (PPI), one of the most commonly prescribed medications, carry a myriad of adverse events. For colorectal cancer (CRC) patients, it still remains unclear whether the concurrent use of proton pump inhibitors (PPI) would negatively affect chemotherapy. PubMed, Medline, Embase, and Cochrane Library were searched from inception to 10 June 2022, to identify relevant studies involving CRC patients receiving chemotherapy and reporting comparative survival outcomes between PPI users and non-users. Meta-analyses were performed using random-effects models. We identified 16 studies involving 8,188 patients (PPI = 1,789; non-PPI = 6,329) receiving either capecitabine-based or fluorouracil-based regimens. The overall survival (HR, 1.02; 95% CI, 0.91 to 1.15; I2 = 0%) and progression-free survival (HR, 1.15; 95% CI, 0.98 to 1.35; I2 = 29%) were similar between PPI users and non-users in patients taking capecitabine-based regimens, with low statis-tical heterogeneity. Although the subgroup analysis indicated that early-stage cancer patients taking capecitabine monotherapy with concurrent PPI had a significantly higher disease progression rate (HR, 1.96; 95% CI, 1.21 to 3.16; I2 = 0%) than those who did not use PPIs, both groups had comparable all-cause mortality (HR, 1.31; 95% CI, 0.75 to 2.29; I2 = 0%). On the other hand, there was little difference in both OS and PFS in both early- and end-stage patients taking capecitabine combination therapy between PPI users and non-users. Conversely, the use of concomitant PPI in patients taking fluorouracil-based regimens contributed to a marginally significant higher all-cause mortality (HR, 1.18; 95% CI, 1.00 to 1.40; I2 = 74%), but with high statistical heterogeneity. In conclusion, PPI has little survival influence on CRC patients treated with capecitabine-based regimens, especially in patients taking capecitabine combination therapy. Thus, it should be safe for clinicians to prescribe PPI in these patients. Although patients treated with fluorouracil-based regimens with concomitant PPI trended toward higher all-cause mortality, results were subject to considerable heterogeneity.Systematic Review Registration: identifier https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?ID=CRD42022338161

Sufficient alveolar bone is a safeguard for achieving desired outcomes in orthodontic treatment. Moving a tooth into an alveolar bony defect may result in a periodontal defect or worse–tooth loss. Therefore, when facing a pathologic situation such as periodontal bone loss, alveolar clefts, long-term tooth loss, trauma, and thin phenotype, bone grafting is often necessary to augment bone for orthodontic treatment purposes. Currently, diverse bone grafts are used in clinical practice, but no single grafting material shows absolutely superior results over the others. All available materials demonstrate pros and cons, most notably donor morbidity and adverse effects on orthodontic treatment. Here, we review newly developed graft materials that are still in the pre-clinical stage, as well as new combinations of existing materials, by highlighting their effects on alveolar bone regeneration and orthodontic tooth movement. In addition, novel manufacturing techniques, such as bioprinting, will be discussed. This mini-review article will provide state-of-the-art information to assist clinicians in selecting grafting material(s) that enhance alveolar bone augmentation while avoiding unfavorable side effects during orthodontic treatment.

Making sense of multiple modalities can yield a more comprehensive description of real-world phenomena. However, learning the co-representation of diverse modalities is still a long-standing endeavor in emerging machine learning applications and research. Previous generative approaches for multimodal input approximate a joint-modality posterior by uni-modality posteriors as product-of-experts (PoE) or mixture-of-experts (MoE). We argue that these approximations lead to a defective bound for the optimization process and loss of semantic connection among modalities. This paper presents a novel variational method on sets called the Set Multimodal VAE (SMVAE) for learning a multimodal latent space while handling the missing modality problem. By modeling the joint-modality posterior distribution directly, the proposed SMVAE learns to exchange information between multiple modalities and compensate for the drawbacks caused by factorization. In public datasets of various domains, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is applicable to order-agnostic cross-modal generation while achieving outstanding performance compared to the state-of-the-art multimodal methods. The source code for our method is available online https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SMVAE-9B3C/., Comment: First Submission

Dense depth estimation plays a key role in multiple applications such as robotics, 3D reconstruction, and augmented reality. While sparse signal, e.g., LiDAR and Radar, has been leveraged as guidance for enhancing dense depth estimation, the improvement is limited due to its low density and imbalanced distribution. To maximize the utility from the sparse source, we propose $S^3$ technique, which expands the depth value from sparse cues while estimating the confidence of expanded region. The proposed $S^3$ can be applied to various guided depth estimation approaches and trained end-to-end at different stages, including input, cost volume and output. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and flexibility of the $S^3$ technique on LiDAR and Radar signal., Comment: CVPR 2021

Indoor positioning technology is widely used in-many fields today, such as warehouse management, industrial automation, and disaster relief. However, current methods do not balance every well in real-time performance, positioning accuracy, industrial cost, and power consumption. These limitations may hinder indoor positioning technology to develop more wide application domain. This paper carries out a research on indoor positioning. We creatively propose the dense placement of the visual landmark, which consists of custom coding points that obtain rich location and navigation information. Then we present a positioning method based on the recognition of feature points. In addition, for improving the speed and reducing power consumption, this paper optimizes the algorithm of the feature point detection, and realizes the algorithm-specific integrated circuit on FPGA. The simulation results show that the proposed system achieves excellent results in speed, power, and accuracy. The speed of positioning is up to 45 times/s, the power consumption is as low as 68 mW, and the positioning accuracy reaches 2.9 mm. Furthermore, this system is robust for different environments, and requires lower cost, which has a good application prospect in the application of IoT with the arrival of industry 4.0.

Resting-state functional connectivity analyses have revealed a significant effect on the inter-regional interactions in brain. The brain age prediction based on resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging has been proved as biomarkers to characterize the typical brain development and neuropsychiatric disorders. The brain age prediction model based on functional connectivity measurements derived from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging has received a lots of interest in recent years due to its great success in age prediction. However, some of the recent studies rely on experienced neuroscientist experts to select appropriate connectivity features in order to build a robust model for prediction while the others just selected the features based on trial-and-error test. Besides, the subjects used in this studies omitted some subjects that can be divided into two groups with less similarity which may confused the prediction model. In this study, we proposed a multi-class age categories discrimination method with the connectivity features selected via K-means clustering with no prior knowledge provided. The experimental results show that with K-means selected features the proposed model better discriminate multi-class age categories.

In this paper, we present the absorption and photoluminescence (PL) spectra of conjugated, metal-free organic dyes, triphenylamine derivatives 3-(4-(bis(4-(5-(4-(hexyloxy)phenyl)thiophenyl)phenyl)amino)phenyl)-2-cyanoacrylic acid (OD3) and (E)-3-(5′-(4-(bis(4-(5-(4-hexyloxy)phenyl)thiophen-2-yl)phenyl)amino)phenyl)-2,2′-bithiophen-5-yl)-2-cyanoacrylic acid (OD3DT), with and without a π-conjugated bridge, respectively, in film at a temperature range from 13 to 400 K. We find that the intensities of absorption and PL of OD3 decrease gradually beyond 200 K, as well as the ratios of integral areas of absorption to PL spectra. However, the other compound, OD3DT, shows a very different behavior. An increase is discovered in the ratio of the absorption to PL integral area when the temperature is higher than 200 K. A π-conjugated bridge gives this compound a higher degree of symmetry, and therefore, a better alignment of the molecules in the film, which causes a stacking aggregation such that the temperature effect on this compound is different than OD3.

Two-step hydrothermal processes have been used to synthesize MoS2@SnO2 core-shell sub-microspheres. The effect of the different weight of citric acid for MoS2@SnO2 core-shell sub-microspheres on the microstructural and photocatalytic properties was studied. The results indicate that MoS2@SnO2 core-shell sub-microspheres can reveal the highly efficient photocatalytic water splitting and degradation of rhodamine B solution under visible-light irradiation. The enhanced photocatalytic performance was ascribed to MoS2 sub-microspheres decorated with SnO2 nanoparticles, improving their surface-to-volume ratio and photoinduced electron-hole pairs separation.

Table S3. Detailed measurement of cell viability in therapeutic screening against HCT116 and HT29 cells. (DOCX 632Â kb)

Table S2. Upregulated genes associated with the Wnt signaling pathway in HCT116-derived tumorspheres (analyzed using PANTHER, http://pantherdb.org /). (DOCX 14Â kb)

The optimum conditions for the extraction and separation of chondroitin sulfate from tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) byproducts were studied in the paper. The chondroitin sulfate was extracted by the combination of ultrasonic and microwave. On the basis of the single factor tests, the response surface methodology was taken to study the optimum process of extraction. Results show that the best conditions for the extraction and separation of chondroitin sulfate from tilapia byproducts are: the ultrasonic power is 50W, the microwave power is 98W, the extraction time is 120s, the ratio of solid to liquid is 1:50 (g/mL), and under these conditions, the extraction rate of chondroitin sulfate is 2.513%.

Vickrey auction has its comparative advantages [1] in economic perspectives. In second price sealed-bid auction, bidderspsila bidding strategies are not affected by closing method. In a first-price auction, bidders always bid below their values. In year 2007, author proposed one round first price anonymous auction protocol [2] to solve the tie problem in one round auction. This paper is to extend the one round anonymous auction protocol from first price to second price auction protocol.

Auctions have become a major phenomenon of electronic commerce. A lot of papers are published to enhance the security of auctions. But how do author handle tie-breaking in sealed-bid auctions? One round auction protocol [5] makes use of super increasing sequence algorithm to find out the tie bidders and compare among their time stamp to solve the tie. This paper analyzes the significance of one round anonymous auction in various desired properties of sealed bid auction. Author performs comparison over the multi-round [1] [3] and one round anonymous auction protocol in various desired properties and various possible attacks may happen.

In Crypto '93, Stefan Brands (1993) proposed a very efficient off-line electronic cash. Then, the subsequent researchers such as Ernest Foo (1999, 2000), WK Yip (2000) and Yiannis (1998) developed their schemes based upon Brands model (Brands,1993) to improve Brands' efficiency. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of attacks on Brands scheme's security aspect. By our attacks presented here, we conclude the security aspect of (Brands, 1993; Boyd et al., 1999; Foo, 2000; Goh and Yip, 2000; Chan et al., 1998) has been defeated by us. Although we address here that Brands' security aspect need to be further investigated, but the anonymous feature in Brand's scheme (1993) remain significant contributions to electronic cash, especially for privacy reason.

Automatic teller machines, Internet kiosks etc. are examples of public untrusted terminals. One of the security concerns in such systems is the so called fake terminal attack: the attacker sets up a fake terminal and fools unsuspecting user into revealing sensitive information, such as PINs. In this paper, we examine this problem in different scenarios and propose appropriate solutions. Our basic approach is to find ways for a user to authenticate a public terminal before using it to process sensitive information.

A payment transaction protocol is proposed to securely implement payment transactions between mutually distrustful parties. This protocol is designed to operate over an open network, and can be implemented using currently available encryption technology.

1 lámina, The Pyrgmorphidae are divisible into 30 tribes on the basis of their external morphology, phallic and concealed female structures — some change from the previous arrangement of these tribes is proposed. A linear sequence is difficult to devise because of the lack of correIation in the different tribes between 'primitive and `derived' characters. The tribes are placed in two arbitrary groups, A and B, based largely on the form and disposition of the metasternal pits. Within Group A, four, 'and 'within Group B, six series of tribes are recognized. The present work deals in detail only with Series I and II of Group A, but all series and tribes are usted, together with notes on recent changes. For each tribe of Series I and II, the full tribal synonymy, a definition, with particular reference to the phallic and concealed female structures, and all included genera and species 'with their general geographic distributions are given. The phallic and concealed female structures of a representative of each genus are illustrated in detail (except for genera in .which only one sex is known). Some discussion of tribal relationships is included where appropriate.

The mainly tropical and subtropical acridoid family Pyrgomorphidae includes over 140 genera grouped in 30 tribes. The present work serves as a general introduction to a comparative morphological study of the phallic structures, female subgenital armature and receptacula seminis of every tribe and almost every known g-enus and subgenus. A general accottnt and literature review in respect of the acridoid phallic complex are given and the special features of the Pyrgomorphidae are discussed. An attempt is made to homologize phallic terminology throughout the Acridoidea. A synopsis of the phallic characters of the Pyrgomorphidae in general is given. A general account and literature review are also given in respect of the female subgenital armature and receptaculum seniins of the Acridoidea, with special reference to the Pyrgomorphidae. In discussing the receptaculum seminis, different orthopteroid orders are considered with particular reference to the bifid or paired nature of the organ and the varous modifications as they occur throughout the group. The paired condition is believed to be primitive in Dictyoptera, Isoptera and Orthoptera, s. str. In the last order, parallel variations exist within the suborders Ensifera and Caelifera, particularly Pyrgomorphidae. The homologies in the receptaculum seminis throug-hout the different families of Acridoidea are discussed and a hypothetical generalized form of the organ is illustrated. Terminology is reviewed and revised for both subgenital armature and receptaculum seminis. Synonymic glossaries of the terms adopted in the present studies for both male and female genitalic structures in the Pyrgomorphidae are given. For the most part the terms used are generally applicable throughout the Acridoidea, although there are a few structures that are peculiar to Pyrgoinorphidae. Some structures found in other groups are absent in Pyrgomorphidae.

Refereed/Peer-reviewed Mobile robot navigation is an essential problem in robotics. We propose a method for constructing and training fuzzy logic controllers (FLCs) to coordinate a robotic team performing collision-free navigation and arriving simultaneously at a target location in an unknown environment. Our FLCs are organized in a multilayered architecture to reduce the number of tunable parameters and improve the scalability of the solution. In addition, in contrast to simple traditional switching mechanisms between target seeking and obstacle avoidance, we develop a novel rule-embedded FLC to improve the navigation performance. Moreover, we design a grouping and merging mechanism to obtain transparent fuzzy sets and integrate this mechanism into the training process for all FLCs, thus increasing the interpretability of the fuzzy models. We train the proposed FLCs using a novel multiobjective hybrid approach combining a genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms in reliably solving the proposed navigation problem. usc