The integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has been envisioned as one representative usage scenario of sixth-generation (6G) network. However, the unprecedented characteristics of 6G, especially the doubly dispersive channel, make classical ISAC waveforms rather challenging to guarantee a desirable performance level. The recently proposed affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) can attain full diversity even under doubly dispersive effects, thus becoming a competitive candidate for next-generation ISAC waveforms. Relevant investigations are still at an early stage, which involve only straightforward design lacking explicit theoretical analysis. This paper provides an in-depth investigation on AFDM waveform design for ISAC applications. Specifically, the closed-form Crámer-Rao bounds of target detection for AFDM are derived, followed by a demonstration on its merits over existing counterparts. Furthermore, we formulate the ambiguity function of the pilot-assisted AFDM waveform for the first time, revealing conditions for stable sensing performance. To further enhance both the communication and sensing performance of the AFDM waveform, we propose a novel pilot design by exploiting the characteristics of AFDM signals. The proposed design is analytically validated to be capable of optimizing the ambiguity function property and channel estimation accuracy simultaneously as well as overcoming the sensing and channel estimation range limitation originated from the pilot spacing. Numerical results have verified the superiority of the proposed pilot design in terms of dual-functional performance.

Plasma protein binding data of BR-cpd7.

Pharmacokinetics parameters for BR-cpd7.

Supplementary data: experimental section

In cloud-Internet of Things (IoT) healthcare systems, private medical data leakage is a serious concern as the cloud server is not fully trusted. Dynamic searchable symmetric encryption (DSSE), with necessary forward and backward privacy security properties, enables doctors to retrieve ciphertexts while guaranteeing data privacy. However, existing forward and backward private DSSE schemes are not well-suited for cloud-IoT healthcare systems with attribute-value type databases. To this end, we propose an efficient privacy-preserving conjunctive searchable encryption scheme for cloud-IoT healthcare systems, called PC-SE. It is the first conjunctive DSSE scheme designed for attribute-value type databases. Specifically, we design flexible search capabilities for PC-SE to address users' various search requirements. It can not only achieve precise conjunctive search based on keywords but also realize broad attribute search. Moreover, our scheme achieves fine-grained search for attribute values while maintaining forward and Type-I-backward privacy. This approach reduces the communication burden and minimizes the risk of privacy exposure. To ensure that users with different authorities can only access the corresponding attribute values, we introduce an attribute access control mechanism in PC-SE. Finally, security analysis and experimental results demonstrate that PC-SE is secure and effective.

Liver microsome metabolic stability data of BR-cpd7.

Anti-proliferative activity of BR-cpd7 and BGJ398 in multiple human cancer cell lines. Human cancer cells were subjected to different concentrations of BR-cpd7 or BGJ398, and IC50 at 4 or 5 days was calculated (n=3 replicates).

This paper investigates a sensing-assisted predictive beamforming framework for UAV--buoy maritime monitoring by explicitly accounting for wave-induced buoy dynamics and residual sea clutter. A frame-based UAV mission workflow is first established, where the UAV transmits integrated sensing and communication signals to acquire buoy echoes and to support subsequent uplink beam alignment. To characterize short-horizon buoy motion, a correlated-acceleration state-space model is developed by combining a Singer process for wave-driven excitation with a slowly varying current-drift term. Given the resulting nonlinear reflection, Doppler, and delay measurements, the posterior Fisher information matrix and the corresponding posterior Cramér--Rao bound (PCRB) are derived, and the predicted horizontal-position PCRB is adopted as the sensing metric. A per-frame worst-buoy design is then formulated to jointly optimize sensing power allocation and UAV position under uplink-rate, UAV-power, and mobility constraints. By exploiting a Schur-complement reformulation and a lagged successive convex approximation, the resulting subproblem is converted into a convex conic program with tractable complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme maintains robust prediction and communication performance under denser buoy deployments and harsher sea conditions, and outperforms several baseline designs. In particular, the pronounced root mean square error (RMSE) degradation of the communication-only benchmark confirms that sensing-assisted state refinement is essential for accurate predictive beamforming in dynamic maritime environments. Compared with a full first-order Taylor expansion method, it achieves a more attractive performance--complexity tradeoff for online deployment.

Massive multiple-input-multiple-output (massive MIMO) has emerged as a cornerstone technology for 5G-advanced and future 6G networks; yet, its practical deployment remains limited by hardware cost and power consumption. Switch-based architectures, which share a small number of RF chains among many antenna elements, provide a scalable alternative, but create a new bottleneck: only a subset of antennas is observable at any given moment, leaving the channel state of the remaining elements unknown. Lacking this information prevents the system from exploiting advanced physical-layer functions, such as digital beamforming or multistream MIMO. In this article, we present ARGUS, a generative channel reconstruction framework that infers the channel state information (CSI) of unobserved antennas from partial observations. The key idea is that all antenna responses are governed by the same underlying wireless propagation environment, enabling the task to be formulated as a generative inference problem. We employ a variational autoencoder (VAE) to capture the latent spatial structure and reconstruct unobserved channels through sampling. Extensive experiments show that our reconstructed CSI incurs less than 2.5% achievable rate loss and real-world measurements demonstrate a more than 90% antenna-selection match rate, confirming the practicality of the proposed approach.

Many existing transport designs aim to deliver ultra-low latency and high bandwidth for applications in high-speed datacenter networks. However, almost all of them intertwine the control of small and large flows using the same control entity (e.g., sender or receiver) and congestion feedback signal (e.g., ECN or credit), thus bringing significant performance impairments. By contrast, we seek to decouple the rate control of small flows from that of large ones. To this end, we present Fork, a new datacenter transport that relies on two parallel control loops. One sender-driven small flow control loop (SCP) runs at the highest priority with a multi-flow ACK clocking mechanism to achieve low-latencies for small flows. Another receiver-driven low-priority large flow control loop (LCP) employs two simple yet effective mechanisms: ECN migration and AIMD credit control, to protect small flow transmission while gracefully utilizing the spare bandwidth left by SCP. We have implemented a Fork prototype based on DPDK, and shown, through both testbed experiments and simulations, that compared to Homa and Aeolus, Fork reduces the average FCT of small flows by up to 81.4% and 67.7%, respectively, while maintaining lower FCTs for large flows.

In harsh environments, such as mountainous terrain, dense vegetation and urban landscapes, a single type of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) may encounter challenges like flight restrictions, difficulty in task execution or increased risk. Therefore, employing multiple types of UAVs to collaborate along with satellite assistance, becomes essential in such scenarios. In this context, we present a stochastic geometry based approach for modeling the heterogeneous non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) by using the classical binomial point process and introducing a novel point process, called Mat & eacute;rn hard-core cluster process (MHCCP) which possesses both properties of exclusivity and clustering. Through simulations, MHCCP has been validated as a more suitable model for UAV groups composed of multiple clusters, compared with traditional point processes such as Poisson point process, binomial point process, and Poisson cluster process. This is because MHCCP ensures inter-cluster repulsion while effectively capturing the clustered distribution observed in practical scenarios. Then, taking into account the influence of terrain shadows on the aerial-satellite links in low-altitude harsh environments, we derive closed-form expressions of the outage probability and average ergodic rate for the aerial-to-satellite uplink of heterogeneous NTNs. Unlike existing studies, our analysis adopts an advanced system configuration that combines beamforming with frequency division multiple access and incorporates a shadowed-Rician fading model to accurately capture signal fading under complex environmental conditions. Furthermore, we investigate link performance in the presence of co-channel interference. Monte Carlo simulations validate that the derived closed-form solutions of the outage probability and the average ergodic rate provide a precise quantitative tool for evaluating the reliability and transmission efficiency of the aerial-satellite links, offering deeper insights into system performance in complex environments.

The emerging memristor crossbar array based computing circuits exhibit computing speeds and energy efficiency far surpassing those of traditional digital processors. This type of circuits can complete high-dimensional matrix operations in an extremely short time through analog computing, making it naturally applicable to linear detection and maximum likelihood detection in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. However, the challenge of employing memristor crossbar arrays to efficiently implement other nonlinear detection algorithms, such as the successive interference cancellation (SIC) algorithm, remains unresolved. In this paper we propose a memristor-based circuit design for massive MIMO SIC detector. The proposed circuit comprises several judiciously designed analog matrix computing modules and hybrid analog-digital slicers, which enables the proposed circuit to perform the SIC algorithm with a hybrid analog-digital computing architecture. We show that the computing speed and the computational energy-efficiency of the proposed detector circuit are 43 times faster and 110 times higher, respectively, than those of a traditional 8-core digital signal processor (DSP), and also advantageous over the benchmark high-performance field programmable gate array (FPGA) and graphics processing unit (GPU).

Conversion rate (CVR) prediction is a core component of online advertising systems, where the attribution mechanisms-rules for allocating conversion credit across user touchpoints-fundamentally determine label generation and model optimization. While many industrial platforms support diverse attribution mechanisms (e.g., First-Click, Last-Click, Linear, and Data-Driven Multi-Touch Attribution), conventional approaches restrict model training to labels from a single production-critical attribution mechanism, discarding complementary signals in alternative attribution perspectives. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Multi-Attribution Learning (MAL) framework for CVR prediction that integrates signals from multiple attribution perspectives to better capture the underlying patterns driving user conversions. Specifically, MAL is a joint learning framework consisting of two core components: the Attribution Knowledge Aggregator (AKA) and the Primary Target Predictor (PTP). AKA is implemented as a multi-task learner that integrates knowledge extracted from diverse attribution labels. PTP, in contrast, focuses on the task of generating well-calibrated conversion probabilities that align with the system-optimized attribution metric (e.g., CVR under the Last-Click attribution), ensuring direct compatibility with industrial deployment requirements. Additionally, we propose CAT, a novel training strategy that leverages the Cartesian product of all attribution label combinations to generate enriched supervision signals. This design substantially enhances the performance of the attribution knowledge aggregator. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the superiority of MAL over single-attribution learning baselines, achieving +0.51% GAUC improvement on offline metrics. Online experiments demonstrate that MAL achieved a +2.6% increase in ROI (Return on Investment).

In massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, how to reliably acquire downlink channel state information (CSI) with low overhead is challenging. In this work, by integrating the generative pre-trained Transformer (GPT) with federated-tuning, we propose a CSI-GPT approach to realize efficient downlink CSI acquisition. Specifically, we first propose a Swin Transformer-based channel acquisition network (SWTCAN) to acquire downlink CSI, where pilot signals, downlink channel estimation, and uplink CSI feedback are jointly designed. Furthermore, to solve the problem of insufficient training data, we propose a variational auto-encoder-based channel sample generator (VAE-CSG), which can generate sufficient CSI samples based on a limited number of high-quality CSI data obtained from the current cell. The CSI dataset generated from VAE-CSG will be used for pre-training SWTCAN. To fine-tune the pre-trained SWTCAN for improved performance, we propose an online federated-tuning method, where only a small amount of SWTCAN parameters are unfrozen and updated using over-the-air computation, avoiding the high communication overhead caused by aggregating the complete CSI samples from user equipment (UEs) to the BS for centralized fine-tuning. Simulation results verify the advantages of the proposed SWTCAN and the communication efficiency of the proposed federated-tuning method.

Data privacy leakage has always been a critical concern in cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Dynamic Symmetric Searchable Encryption (DSSE) with forward and backward privacy aims to address this issue by enabling updates and retrievals of ciphertext on untrusted cloud server while ensuring data privacy. However, previous research on DSSE mostly focused on single keyword search, which limits its practical application in cloud-based IoT systems. Recently, Patranabis (NDSS 2021) [1] proposed a groundbreaking DSSE scheme for conjunctive keyword search. However, this scheme fails to effectively handle deletion operations in certain circumstances, resulting in inaccurate query results. Additionally, the scheme introduces unnecessary search overhead. To overcome these problems, we present CKSE, an efficient conjunctive keyword DSSE scheme. Our scheme improves the oblivious shared computation protocol used in the scheme of Patranabis, thus enabling a more comprehensive deletion functionality. Furthermore, we introduce a state chain structure to reduce the search overhead. Through security analysis and experimental evaluation, we demonstrate that our CKSE achieves more comprehensive deletion functionality while maintaining comparable search performance and security, compared to the oblivious dynamic cross-tags protocol of Patranabis. The combination of comprehensive functionality, high efficiency, and security makes our CKSE an ideal choice for deployment in cloud-based IoT systems.

The Digital Twin (DT) technology is considered as a backbone in the Industrial 4.0 revolution as it is playing a vital role in the digitization of various industries. A DT is a virtual representation of a physical entity, thus having the ability to simulate real data generated at physical space to optimize, estimate, control, monitor and forecast states / configurations. Despite enormous benefits, DT technology has several implementation challenges. Although deploying DT on edge or cloud platforms yields a plethora of services, its implementation in both spaces faces certain limitations. These limitations include latency, data communication overload, transmission energy consumption, privacy concerns, and communication inefficiencies. It is evident that these shortcomings could significantly impact real-time monitoring and control. Therefore, when considering whether to deploy DT on the edge or on the cloud, it is necessary to make a trade-off, or alternatively, adopt a hybrid approach. However, it is important to acknowledge that even with a hybrid approach, the aforementioned issues will persist to some extent. To address these challenges, this article introduces two innovative approaches. Local DT (LDT) and Distributed DT (DDT). These deployment strategies are designed to mitigate latency, minimize data communication overload, reduce energy consumption, improve communication efficiency, and strengthen privacy measures.Thus, resulting in environmental and economic sustainability. Consequently, these advancements facilitate superior real-time monitoring and control capabilities. Through the utilization of LDT and DDT methodologies, organizations can harness the full potential of DT technology, thereby maximizing its benefits.

Encrypted sharing of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) data is essential for facilitating collaboration, safeguarding patient privacy, and advancing clinical research. However, existing encryption schemes face numerous challenges in multi-user environments. Traditional proxy re-encryption requires exclusive ciphertext for each user, which is evidently unsuitable for IoMT's multi-user scenarios. Meanwhile, attribute-based encryption provides flexible data access control, but its complex computations and high resource demands limit its use in large-scale IoMT environments. Additionally, challenges like single-point failure and redundant backups emerge in ciphertext storage. To address these challenges, we propose a dual-cryptography mechanism integrating enhanced proxy re-encryption and attribute-based encryption. Our scheme enables unified ciphertext access for authorized users while applying attribute encryption exclusively to small data keys. To mitigate potential data loss from storage server failures, we propose a decentralized ciphertext storage and recovery mechanism with verifiable secret sharing. Furthermore, we implement decentralized ciphertext storage using verifiable secret sharing, ensuring recoverability from server failures. Formal analysis proves confidentiality under the random oracle model. Experimental results demonstrate high security strength, computational efficiency, and robustness. The solution prevents single-point failures, resists collusion attacks, and maintains traceability through blockchain-integrated audit trails.

In this paper, we propose a novel translation model, UniTranslator, for transforming representations between visually distinct domains under conditions of limited training data and significant visual differences. The main idea behind our approach is leveraging the domain-neutral capabilities of CLIP as a bridging mechanism, while utilizing a separate module to extract abstract, domain-agnostic semantics from the embeddings of both the source and target realms. Fusing these abstract semantics with target-specific semantics results in a transformed embedding within the CLIP space. To bridge the gap between the disparate worlds of CLIP and StyleGAN, we introduce a new non-linear mapper, the CLIP2P mapper. Utilizing CLIP embeddings, this module is tailored to approximate the latent distribution in the StyleGAN's latent space, effectively acting as a connector between these two spaces. The proposed UniTranslator is versatile and capable of performing various tasks, including style mixing, stylization, and translations, even in visually challenging scenarios across different visual domains. Notably, UniTranslator generates high-quality translations that showcase domain relevance, diversity, and improved image quality. UniTranslator surpasses the performance of existing general-purpose models and performs well against specialized models in representative tasks. The source code and trained models will be released to the public.

Deep networks have made remarkable progress in Multi-View Stereo (MVS) task in recent years. However, the problem of finding accurate correspondences across different views under ill-posed matching situations remains unresolved and crucial. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Geometry-enhanced Attentive Multi-View Stereo (GA-MVS) network, which can access multi-view consistent feature representation and achieve accurate depth estimation in challenging situations. Specifically, we propose a geometry-enhanced feature extractor to explore illumination-invariant geometric features and incorporate them with common texture features to improve matching accuracy when dealing with view-dependent photometric effects, such as shadow and specularity. Then, we design a novel attentive learning framework to explore per-pixel adaptive supervision, effectively improving the depth estimation performance of textureless regions. The experimental results on the DTU and Tanks & Temples benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results compared to other advanced MVS models.

The pumped storage power station is a complex hydraulic-mechanical-electric coupling system. The coupling effect between subsystems causes the pumped storage power stations to exhibit multi-frequency oscillation characteristics, making stable operation challenging. However, the widely-used eigenvalue analysis, hydraulic vibration analysis, and the Fourier transform methods cannot comprehensively distinguish and quantify the multi-frequency oscillation characteristics of pumped storage power stations. This study aimed to propose a theoretical analysis method to comprehensively investigate the multi-frequency oscillation characteristics and their main influencing factors. First, the mathematical model of a pumped storage power station with upstream and downstream surge tanks was established. Then, a multi-frequency oscillation method for deriving the theoretical formula for the dynamic response was introduced, and verified via numerical simulation. The dominant oscillations in the dynamic response were accurately identified. The results showed that the system was supposed by six frequency oscillations (S1 - S6), and the dynamic response of the rotational speed consisted of a major wave and a tail wave. The major wave was determined by the S1 and S6 oscillations, and the tail wave was determined by the S3 oscillation. Finally, the main factors influencing the multi-frequency oscillations were investigated. The governor parameters and penstock water inertia significantly influenced the S1 and S6 oscillations and thus the major wave. The tailrace tunnel water inertia significantly influenced the S3 oscillation and thus the tail wave. Overall, the proposed method not only enhances our understanding of hydraulic-mechanicalelectric coupling multi-frequency oscillations, but also has important engineering value for ensuring the stable operation of pumped storage power stations.