In this article, an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted integrated satellite-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-terrestrial (SUT) Internet of Things (IoT) network faced with a smart jammer under imperfect channel state information (CSI) conditions is considered. We propose a Stackelberg game model to describe the adversarial relationship between the satellite, UAV, and IRS and the jammer, which are modeled as the leader and the follower, respectively. For the follower subgame, the jammer aims to minimize the jamming power while guaranteeing that the jamming energy efficiency surpasses a certain threshold. Under this setup, the Angle of Arrival (AoA)-based discretization method is utilized to address the imperfect CSI issue. Then, the use-and-then-forget method and the Lagrangian function are employed to obtain a closed-form expression for the jammer’s power. Finally, a feasible jamming power solution is obtained by means of the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality. For the leader subgame, we aim to optimize the hybrid beamforming design of the satellite, UAV and IRS, with the goal of minimizing the total transmit power, while guaranteeing that the downlink received signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) surpasses the minimum communication threshold. We propose an alternating optimization scheme, in which the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality, the AoA-based discretization method, and nonsmooth penalty functions are employed to alternately obtain the optimal satellite beamforming vector, UAV beamforming vector and IRS phase matrix when the other variables are fixed. Through our analytical and numerical results, the proposed beamforming scheme achieves a reduction of 16.9% in average power consumption compared with other benchmark schemes when obtaining the same anti-jamming performance.

Incidents in online service systems could incur poor user experience and tremendous economic loss. To reduce the influence of incidents and guarantee service reliability, it is critical to identify root-cause metrics for engineers with clues to assist incident diagnosis. However, it is a challenging task due to the complicated dependencies and huge volume of various metrics in large-scale systems. Existing approaches are based on either anomaly detection or correlation analysis, performing not well in terms of accuracy or efficiency. To better understand the problem of root-cause metric identification, we conduct a preliminary study based on real-world data analysis and interactions with engineers. The key observation is that root-cause metrics should satisfy two requirements. One is that the metric is expected to behave abnormally during the incident; the other is that the anomaly pattern should meet physical meaning and engineers' demand. Motivated by the findings obtained from the study, we propose an effective approach named PatternMatcher to identifying root-cause metrics accurately. Specifically, PatternMatcher contains three steps, where coarse-grained anomaly detection aiming to filter out normal metrics, anomaly pattern classification aiming to filter out unimportant anomaly patterns, and root-cause metric ranking. An extensive study on four real-world datasets including 113 incident cases from a large commercial bank demonstrates that PatternMatcher outperforms all baseline approaches, achieving top-3 average accuracy of 0.91. Moreover, we have deployed PatternMatcher in practice and shared some successful cases from real deployment.

In large-scale online service system, to enhance the quality of services, engineers need to collect various monitoring data and write many rules to trigger alerts. However, the number of alerts is way more than what on-call engineers can properly investigate. Thus, in practice, alerts are classified into several priority levels using manual rules, and on-call engineers primarily focus on handling the alerts with the highest priority level (i.e., severe alerts). Unfortunately, due to the complex and dynamic nature of the online services, this rule-based approach results in missed severe alerts or wasted troubleshooting time on non-severe alerts. In this paper, we propose AlertRank, an automatic and adaptive framework for identifying severe alerts. Specifically, AlertRank extracts a set of powerful and interpretable features (textual and temporal alert features, univariate and multivariate anomaly features for monitoring metrics), adopts XGBoost ranking algorithm to identify the severe alerts out of all incoming alerts, and uses novel methods to obtain labels for both training and testing. Experiments on the datasets from a top global commercial bank demonstrate that AlertRank is effective and achieves the F1-score of 0.89 on average, outperforming all baselines. The feedback from practice shows AlertRank can significantly save the manual efforts for on-call engineers.

BACKGROUND: The human leukocyte antigen (HLA) gene family plays a key role in the immune response and thus is crucial in many biomedical and clinical settings. Utilizing Sanger sequencing, the golden standard technology for HLA typing enables accurate identification of HLA alleles in high-resolution. However, only the commercial software, such as uTYPE, SBT-Assign, and SBTEngine, and very few open-source tools could be applied to perform HLA typing based on Sanger sequencing. RESULTS: We developed a user-friendly, cross-platform and open-source desktop application, known as SOAPTyping, for Sanger-based typing in HLA class I and II alleles. SOAPTyping can produce accurate results with a comprehensible protocol and featured functions. Moreover, SOAPTyping supports a more advanced group-specific sequencing primers (GSSP) module to solve the ambiguous typing results. We used SOAPTyping to analyze 36 samples with known HLA typing from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) International HLA DNA Exchange platform and 100 anonymous clinical samples, and the HLA typing results from SOAPTyping are identical to the golden results and 5.5 times faster than commercial software uTYPE, which shows the usability of SOAPTyping. CONCLUSIONS: We introduce the SOAPTyping as the first open-source and cross-platform HLA typing software with the capability of producing high-resolution HLA typing predictions from Sanger sequence data.

In this study, the air–ground integrated deployment method is studied for the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)‐enabled mobile edge computing (MEC) system. The UAV can help to reduce the delay and energy consumption of MEC. However, the limited coverage range of UAV limits the quality of data offloading. To improve the efficiency of data transmission, a hierarchical game model is designed. Ground nodes form multiple coalitions actively according to the position of UAV and the UAV adjusts the position based on the data distribution of ground networks. The relationship between the UAV and ground nodes is modelled as a Stackelberg game. A coalition formation game (CFG) is constructed for the data gathering among ground nodes. It is proved that the proposed CFG is an exact potential game with at least one Nash equilibrium. Moreover, the property of Stackelberg equilibrium is proven for the air–ground cooperative relationship. Based on the hierarchical model, a distributed air–ground integrated deployment algorithm is proposed to jointly optimise the position of the UAV and the coalition formation of ground nodes. The simulation results show that the proposed method promotes the efficiency of data transmission greatly and can converge to a stable state with reasonable iteration times.

It is well known that essential proteins play an extremely important role in controlling cellular activities in living organisms. Identifying essential proteins from protein protein interaction (PPI) networks is conducive to the understanding of cellular functions and molecular mechanisms. Hitherto, many essential proteins detection methods have been proposed. Nevertheless, those existing identification methods are not satisfactory because of low efficiency and low sensitivity to noisy data. This paper presents a novel computational approach based on artificial fish swarm optimization for essential proteins prediction in PPI networks (called AFSO_EP). In AFSO_EP, first, a part of known essential proteins are randomly chosen as artificial fishes of priori knowledge. Then, detecting essential proteins by imitating four principal biological behaviors of artificial fishes when searching for food or companions, including foraging behavior, following behavior, swarming behavior, and random behavior, in which process, the network topology, gene expression, gene ontology (GO) annotation, and subcellular localization information are utilized. To evaluate the performance of AFSO_EP, we conduct experiments on two species (Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Drosophila melanogaster), the experimental results show that our method AFSO_EP achieves a better performance for identifying essential proteins in comparison with several other well-known identification methods, which confirms the effectiveness of AFSO_EP.

This paper considers the channel estimation for massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) systems, where the base station (BS) employs hybrid analog-digital processing to reduce the hardware complexity. With hybrid analog-digital processing, the BS cannot obtain enough training samples since the number of radio frequency (RF) chains is limited. This results in significant difficulty in the design of channel estimation scheme. This paper aims to address this problem using the emerging machine learning techniques. By exploiting the sparsity property of angular-domain channel, a novel clustered sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) approach is proposed to estimate the channel reliably. The scheme does not require the knowledge of channel statistics and angular information of users. The numerical simulations show that the proposed scheme based on clustered SBL outperform the reference schemes significantly in term of normalized mean square error (NMSE).