Association for Asian Studies

Positive allosteric modulators of free fatty acid receptor 2 induce distinct conformations to bias G protein signaling.

We investigate one of the most basic problems in streaming algorithms: approximating the number of elements in the stream. Famously, [Mor78] gave a randomized algorithm achieving a constant-factor approximation error for streams of length at most N in space $O(\log\log N)$. We investigate the pseudo-deterministic complexity of the problem and prove a tight $\Omega(\log N)$ lower bound, thus resolving a problem of [GGMW20].

On-device learning and efficient fine-tuning enable continuous and\nprivacy-preserving customization (e.g., locally fine-tuning large language\nmodels on personalized data). However, existing training frameworks are\ndesigned for cloud servers with powerful accelerators (e.g., GPUs, TPUs) and\nlack the optimizations for learning on the edge, which faces challenges of\nresource limitations and edge hardware diversity. We introduce PockEngine: a\ntiny, sparse and efficient engine to enable fine-tuning on various edge\ndevices. PockEngine supports sparse backpropagation: it prunes the backward\ngraph and sparsely updates the model with measured memory saving and latency\nreduction while maintaining the model quality. Secondly, PockEngine is\ncompilation first: the entire training graph (including forward, backward and\noptimization steps) is derived at compile-time, which reduces the runtime\noverhead and brings opportunities for graph transformations. PockEngine also\nintegrates a rich set of training graph optimizations, thus can further\naccelerate the training cost, including operator reordering and backend\nswitching. PockEngine supports diverse applications, frontends and hardware\nbackends: it flexibly compiles and tunes models defined in\nPyTorch/TensorFlow/Jax and deploys binaries to mobile CPU/GPU/DSPs. We\nevaluated PockEngine on both vision models and large language models.\nPockEngine achieves up to 15 $\\times$ speedup over off-the-shelf TensorFlow\n(Raspberry Pi), 5.6 $\\times$ memory saving back-propagation (Jetson AGX Orin).\nRemarkably, PockEngine enables fine-tuning LLaMav2-7B on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin\nat 550 tokens/s, 7.9$\\times$ faster than the PyTorch.\n

ABSTRACTFrom the 15th to the 19th century, the Trans-Atlantic Slave-Trade (TAST) influenced the genetic and cultural diversity of numerous populations. We explore genomic and linguistic data from the nine islands of Cabo Verde, the earliest European colony of the era in Africa, a major Slave-Trade platform between the 16th and 19th centuries, and a previously uninhabited location ideal for investigating early admixture events between Europeans and Africans. Using local-ancestry inference approaches, we find that genetic admixture in Cabo Verde occurred primarily between Iberian and certain Senegambian populations, although forced and voluntary migrations to the archipelago involved numerous other populations. Inter-individual genetic and linguistic variation recapitulates the geographic distribution of individuals’ birth-places across Cabo Verdean islands, following an isolation-by-distance model with reduced genetic and linguistic effective dispersals within the archipelago, and suggesting that Kriolu language variants have developed together with genetic divergences at very reduced geographical scales. Furthermore, based on approximate bayesian computation inferences of highly complex admixture histories, we find that admixture occurred early on each island, long before the 18th-century massive TAST deportations triggered by the expansion of the plantation economy in Africa and the Americas, and after this era mostly during the abolition of the TAST and of slavery in European colonial empires. Our results illustrate how shifting socio-cultural relationships between enslaved and non-enslaved communities during and after the TAST, shaped enslaved-African descendants’ genomic diversity and structure on both sides of the Atlantic.

Raina has been to South Africa three times and was one of my assistants on the final trip in 2015. Students return often because they find the experience transformative and want to attend as long as they can. Raina, of course, has taught the module innumerable times and has chosen to write about the module itself. She sees the module as a critical peer education tool and so examines all of its components, and in doing so she reveals that the process of the module is the key to its success—the processes of relationships, of culture, of generosity, of humility, and of love.

Beginning with her childhood in Guyana, the author traces the experiences that spurred her awareness of Marxism, colonization, and the cultural forces that shaped her ideas of gender and race. She outlines the influences of her early ideas—from Gramsci, Paulo Freire, and Thomas Kuhn, to feminist writers like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Chandra Mohanty. But it is Ela Bhatt and the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) that were the inspiration for the HIV low-literate module, since illiterate women workers built SEWA whose very existence makes the case for modernizing the construct of the proletariat. Here the workers are not male, not literate, not white, not in a factory. SEWA did this in the 1920s, helping street hawkers grow into organic intellectuals.

This is the story of the life of Sithembiso called Malcolm X by his POA colleagues. He epitomized all the principles of POA and carried out his work in Nkandla, bringing many changes and challenges to the students in the only school there. This chapter illustrates the project of POA in its purest form.

This address was intended to be and remains about global circulatory processes and the ways that human societies have sought to deploy, control, or regulate these processes. In this essay, I principally consider how nationalist ideologies regulate global circulatory processes. The parallel with the current COVID-19 crisis is evident, and my remarks do suggest some similarities. Although COVID-19 is not the topic I engage here, my theme alerts us to thinking methodologically about largely invisible or inconspicuous modes of circulation and their consequences, less dire but deeply transformative.

<p>Parker Solar Probe (PSP) has completed four encounters with the Sun since launch, three with a perihelion of 35.7 solar radii and one at 27.9 solar radii in January of this year.  More than a factor of two closer to the Sun than any previous mission, observations by the spacecraft are already revealing a surprisingly dynamic and non-thermal solar wind plasma near the Sun.  An overview of initial findings related to the solar wind and coronal plasmas will be presented, including the discovery of large-amplitude velocity spikes, highly non-thermal distribution functions, and large non-radial flows of plasma near the Sun observed by the Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons (SWEAP) Investigation plasma instruments and the FIELDS Investigation electromagnetic field instruments.  Once PSP dropped below a quarter of the distance from the Sun to the Earth, SWEAP began to detect a persistent and growing rotational circulation of the plasma around the Sun peaking at 40-50 km/s at perihelion as the Alfvén mach number fell to 3.  This finding may support theories for enhanced stellar angular momentum loss due to rigid coronal rotation, but the circulation is large, and angular momentum does not appear to be conserved, suggesting that torques still act on the young wind at these distances.  PSP also measured numerous intense and organized Alfvénic velocity spikes with strong propagating field reversals and large jumps in speed.  These field reversals and jets call for an overhaul in our understanding of the turbulent fluctuations that may, by energizing the solar wind, hold the key to its origin.</p>