Rebels Lead to the Doctrine of the Mean: Opinion Dynamic in a Heterogeneous DeGroot Model

We study an extension of the DeGroot model where part of the players may be rebels. The updating rule for rebels is quite different with that of normal players (which are referred to as conformists): at each step a rebel first takes the opposite value of the weighted average of her neighbors' opinions, i.e. 1 minus that average (the opinion space is assumed to be [0,1] as usual), and then updates her opinion by taking another weighted average between that value and her own opinion in the last round. We find that the effect of rebels is rather significant: as long as there is at least one rebel in every closed and strongly connected group, under very weak conditions, the opinion of each player in the whole society will eventually tend to 0.5.Comment: 7 pages, Proceedings of The 6th International Conference on Knowledge, Information and Creativity Support Systems, Beijing, 201

Open-Category Classification by Adversarial Sample Generation

In real-world classification tasks, it is difficult to collect training samples from all possible categories of the environment. Therefore, when an instance of an unseen class appears in the prediction stage, a robust classifier should be able to tell that it is from an unseen class, instead of classifying it to be any known category. In this paper, adopting the idea of adversarial learning, we propose the ASG framework for open-category classification. ASG generates positive and negative samples of seen categories in the unsupervised manner via an adversarial learning strategy. With the generated samples, ASG then learns to tell seen from unseen in the supervised manner. Experiments performed on several datasets show the effectiveness of ASG.Comment: Published in IJCAI 201

GPSP: Graph Partition and Space Projection based Approach for Heterogeneous Network Embedding

In this paper, we propose GPSP, a novel Graph Partition and Space Projection based approach, to learn the representation of a heterogeneous network that consists of multiple types of nodes and links. Concretely, we first partition the heterogeneous network into homogeneous and bipartite subnetworks. Then, the projective relations hidden in bipartite subnetworks are extracted by learning the projective embedding vectors. Finally, we concatenate the projective vectors from bipartite subnetworks with the ones learned from homogeneous subnetworks to form the final representation of the heterogeneous network. Extensive experiments are conducted on a real-life dataset. The results demonstrate that GPSP outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in two key network mining tasks: node classification and clustering.Comment: WWW 2018 Poste

CAS9 is a genome mutator by directly disrupting DNA-PK dependent DNA repair pathway.

With its high efficiency for site-specific genome editing and easy manipulation, the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/ CRISPR associated protein 9 (CAS9) system has become the most widely used gene editing technology in biomedical research. In addition, significant progress has been made for the clinical development of CRISPR/CAS9 based gene therapies of human diseases, several of which are entering clinical trials. Here we report that CAS9 protein can function as a genome mutator independent of any exogenous guide RNA (gRNA) in human cells, promoting genomic DNA double-stranded break (DSB) damage and genomic instability. CAS9 interacts with the KU86 subunit of the DNA-dependent protein kinase (DNA-PK) complex and disrupts the interaction between KU86 and its kinase subunit, leading to defective DNA-PK-dependent repair of DNA DSB damage via non-homologous end-joining (NHEJ) pathway. XCAS9 is a CAS9 variant with potentially higher fidelity and broader compatibility, and dCAS9 is a CAS9 variant without nuclease activity. We show that XCAS9 and dCAS9 also interact with KU86 and disrupt DNA DSB repair. Considering the critical roles of DNA-PK in maintaining genomic stability and the pleiotropic impact of DNA DSB damage responses on cellular proliferation and survival, our findings caution the interpretation of data involving CRISPR/CAS9-based gene editing and raise serious safety concerns of CRISPR/CAS9 system in clinical application

Label-free high-throughput photoacoustic tomography of suspected circulating melanoma tumor cells in patients in vivo

Significance: Detection and characterization of circulating tumor cells (CTCs), a key determinant of metastasis, are critical for determining risk of disease progression, understanding metastatic pathways, and facilitating early clinical intervention. Aim: We aim to demonstrate label-free imaging of suspected melanoma CTCs. Approach: We use a linear-array-based photoacoustic tomography system (LA-PAT) to detect melanoma CTCs, quantify their contrast-to-noise ratios (CNRs), and measure their flow velocities in most of the superficial veins in humans. Results: With LA-PAT, we successfully imaged suspected melanoma CTCs in patients in vivo, with a CNR >9. CTCs were detected in 3 of 16 patients with stage III or IV melanoma. Among the three CTC-positive patients, two had disease progression; among the 13 CTC-negative patients, 4 showed disease progression. Conclusions: We suggest that LA-PAT can detect suspected melanoma CTCs in patients in vivo and has potential clinical applications for disease monitoring in melanoma