TY - JOUR AU - Azevedo, Ricardo B AU - Lohaus, Rolf AU - Tiago Paixao ID - 2900 IS - 5 JF - Evolution & Development TI - Networking networks VL - 10 ER - TY - CONF AB - Motivated by an application in cell biology, we describe an extension of the kinetic data structures framework from Delaunay triangulations to fixed-radius alpha complexes. Our algorithm is implemented using CGAL, following the exact geometric computation paradigm. We report on several techniques to accelerate the computation that turn our implementation applicable to the underlying biological problem. AU - Kerber, Michael AU - Edelsbrunner, Herbert ID - 2906 T2 - 2013 Proceedings of the 15th Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments TI - 3D kinetic alpha complexes and their implementation ER - TY - JOUR AB - Coalescent simulation has become an indispensable tool in population genetics and many complex evolutionary scenarios have been incorporated into the basic algorithm. Despite many years of intense interest in spatial structure, however, there are no available methods to simulate the ancestry of a sample of genes that occupy a spatial continuum. This is mainly due to the severe technical problems encountered by the classical model of isolation by distance. A recently introduced model solves these technical problems and provides a solid theoretical basis for the study of populations evolving in continuous space. We present a detailed algorithm to simulate the coalescent process in this model, and provide an efficient implementation of a generalised version of this algorithm as a freely available Python module. AU - Kelleher, Jerome AU - Barton, Nicholas H AU - Etheridge, Alison ID - 2910 IS - 7 JF - Bioinformatics TI - Coalescent simulation in continuous space VL - 29 ER - TY - JOUR AB - We survey a class of models for spatially structured populations which we have called spatial Λ-Fleming–Viot processes. They arise from a flexible framework for modelling in which the key innovation is that random genetic drift is driven by a Poisson point process of spatial ‘events’. We demonstrate how this overcomes some of the obstructions to modelling populations which evolve in two- (and higher-) dimensional spatial continua, how its predictions match phenomena observed in data and how it fits with classical models. Finally we outline some directions for future research. AU - Barton, Nicholas H AU - Etheridge, Alison AU - Véber, Amandine ID - 2909 IS - 1 JF - Journal of Statistical Mechanics Theory and Experiment TI - Modelling evolution in a spatial continuum VL - 2013 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Hybridization is an almost inevitable component of speciation, and its study can tell us much about that process. However, hybridization itself may have a negligible influence on the origin of species: on the one hand, universally favoured alleles spread readily across hybrid zones, whilst on the other, spatially heterogeneous selection causes divergence despite gene flow. Thus, narrow hybrid zones or occasional hybridisation may hardly affect the process of divergence. AU - Barton, Nicholas H ID - 2908 IS - 2 JF - Journal of Evolutionary Biology TI - Does hybridisation influence speciation? VL - 26 ER - TY - CHAP AB - Sex and recombination are among the most striking features of the living world, and they play a crucial role in allowing the evolution of complex adaptation. The sharing of genomes through the sexual union of different individuals requires elaborate behavioral and physiological adaptations. At the molecular level, the alignment of two DNA double helices, followed by their precise cutting and rejoining, is an extraordinary feat. Sex and recombination have diverse—and often surprising—evolutionary consequences: distinct sexes, elaborate mating displays, selfish genetic elements, and so on. AU - Barton, Nicholas H ID - 2907 SN - 9780691149776 T2 - The Princeton Guide to Evolution TI - Recombination and sex ER - TY - JOUR AB - The ability of an organism to distinguish between various stimuli is limited by the structure and noise in the population code of its sensory neurons. Here we infer a distance measure on the stimulus space directly from the recorded activity of 100 neurons in the salamander retina. In contrast to previously used measures of stimulus similarity, this "neural metric" tells us how distinguishable a pair of stimulus clips is to the retina, based on the similarity between the induced distributions of population responses. We show that the retinal distance strongly deviates from Euclidean, or any static metric, yet has a simple structure: we identify the stimulus features that the neural population is jointly sensitive to, and show the support-vector-machine- like kernel function relating the stimulus and neural response spaces. We show that the non-Euclidean nature of the retinal distance has important consequences for neural decoding. AU - Tkacik, Gasper AU - Granot Atedgi, Einat AU - Segev, Ronen AU - Schneidman, Elad ID - 2913 IS - 5 JF - Physical Review Letters TI - Retinal metric: a stimulus distance measure derived from population neural responses VL - 110 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Oriented mitosis is essential during tissue morphogenesis. The Wnt/planar cell polarity (Wnt/PCP) pathway orients mitosis in a number of developmental systems, including dorsal epiblast cell divisions along the animal-vegetal (A-V) axis during zebrafish gastrulation. How Wnt signalling orients the mitotic plane is, however, unknown. Here we show that, in dorsal epiblast cells, anthrax toxin receptor 2a (Antxr2a) accumulates in a polarized cortical cap, which is aligned with the embryonic A-V axis and forecasts the division plane. Filamentous actin (F-actin) also forms an A-V polarized cap, which depends on Wnt/PCP and its effectors RhoA and Rock2. Antxr2a is recruited to the cap by interacting with actin. Antxr2a also interacts with RhoA and together they activate the diaphanous-related formin zDia2. Mechanistically, Antxr2a functions as a Wnt-dependent polarized determinant, which, through the action of RhoA and zDia2, exerts torque on the spindle to align it with the A-V axis. AU - Castanon, Irinka AU - Abrami, Laurence AU - Holtzer, Laurent AU - Heisenberg, Carl-Philipp J AU - Van Der Goot, Françoise AU - González Gaitán, Marcos ID - 2918 IS - 1 JF - Nature Cell Biology TI - Anthrax toxin receptor 2a controls mitotic spindle positioning VL - 15 ER - TY - JOUR AB - The distribution of the phytohormone auxin regulates many aspects of plant development including growth response to gravity. Gravitropic root curvature involves coordinated and asymmetric cell elongation between the lower and upper side of the root, mediated by differential cellular auxin levels. The asymmetry in the auxin distribution is established and maintained by a spatio-temporal regulation of the PIN-FORMED (PIN) auxin transporter activity. We provide novel insights into the complex regulation of PIN abundance and activity during root gravitropism. We show that PIN2 turnover is differentially regulated on the upper and lower side of gravistimulated roots by distinct but partially overlapping auxin feedback mechanisms. In addition to regulating transcription and clathrin-mediated internalization, auxin also controls PIN abundance at the plasma membrane by promoting their vacuolar targeting and degradation. This effect of elevated auxin levels requires the activity of SKP-Cullin-F-box TIR1/AFB (SCF TIR1/AFB)-dependent pathway. Importantly, also suboptimal auxin levels mediate PIN degradation utilizing the same signalling pathway. These feedback mechanisms are functionally important during gravitropic response and ensure fine-tuning of auxin fluxes for maintaining as well as terminating asymmetric growth. AU - Baster, Pawel AU - Robert, Stéphanie AU - Kleine Vehn, Jürgen AU - Vanneste, Steffen AU - Kania, Urszula AU - Grunewald, Wim AU - De Rybel, Bert AU - Beeckman, Tom AU - Friml, Jirí ID - 2919 IS - 2 JF - EMBO Journal TI - SCF^TIR1 AFB-auxin signalling regulates PIN vacuolar trafficking and auxin fluxes during root gravitropism VL - 32 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Cell polarisation in development is a common and fundamental process underlying embryo patterning and morphogenesis, and has been extensively studied over the past years. Our current knowledge of cell polarisation in development is predominantly based on studies that have analysed polarisation of single cells, such as eggs, or cellular aggregates with a stable polarising interface, such as cultured epithelial cells (St Johnston and Ahringer, 2010). However, in embryonic development, particularly of vertebrates, cell polarisation processes often encompass large numbers of cells that are placed within moving and proliferating tissues, and undergo mesenchymal-to-epithelial transitions with a highly complex spatiotemporal choreography. How such intricate cell polarisation processes in embryonic development are achieved has only started to be analysed. By using live imaging of neurulation in the transparent zebrafish embryo, Buckley et al (2012) now describe a novel polarisation strategy by which cells assemble an apical domain in the part of their cell body that intersects with the midline of the forming neural rod. This mechanism, along with the previously described mirror-symmetric divisions (Tawk et al, 2007), is thought to trigger formation of both neural rod midline and lumen. AU - Compagnon, Julien AU - Heisenberg, Carl-Philipp J ID - 2920 IS - 1 JF - EMBO Journal TI - Neurulation coordinating cell polarisation and lumen formation VL - 32 ER - TY - CONF AB - A chain rule for an entropy notion H(.) states that the entropy H(X) of a variable X decreases by at most l if conditioned on an l-bit string A, i.e., H(X|A)>= H(X)-l. More generally, it satisfies a chain rule for conditional entropy if H(X|Y,A)>= H(X|Y)-l. All natural information theoretic entropy notions we are aware of (like Shannon or min-entropy) satisfy some kind of chain rule for conditional entropy. Moreover, many computational entropy notions (like Yao entropy, unpredictability entropy and several variants of HILL entropy) satisfy the chain rule for conditional entropy, though here not only the quantity decreases by l, but also the quality of the entropy decreases exponentially in l. However, for the standard notion of conditional HILL entropy (the computational equivalent of min-entropy) the existence of such a rule was unknown so far. In this paper, we prove that for conditional HILL entropy no meaningful chain rule exists, assuming the existence of one-way permutations: there exist distributions X,Y,A, where A is a distribution over a single bit, but $H(X|Y)>>H(X|Y,A)$, even if we simultaneously allow for a massive degradation in the quality of the entropy. The idea underlying our construction is based on a surprising connection between the chain rule for HILL entropy and deniable encryption. AU - Krenn, Stephan AU - Pietrzak, Krzysztof Z AU - Wadia, Akshay ED - Sahai, Amit ID - 2940 TI - A counterexample to the chain rule for conditional HILL entropy, and what deniable encryption has to do with it VL - 7785 ER - TY - CONF AB - Many visual datasets are traditionally used to analyze the performance of different learning techniques. The evaluation is usually done within each dataset, therefore it is questionable if such results are a reliable indicator of true generalization ability. We propose here an algorithm to exploit the existing data resources when learning on a new multiclass problem. Our main idea is to identify an image representation that decomposes orthogonally into two subspaces: a part specific to each dataset, and a part generic to, and therefore shared between, all the considered source sets. This allows us to use the generic representation as un-biased reference knowledge for a novel classification task. By casting the method in the multi-view setting, we also make it possible to use different features for different databases. We call the algorithm MUST, Multitask Unaligned Shared knowledge Transfer. Through extensive experiments on five public datasets, we show that MUST consistently improves the cross-datasets generalization performance. AU - Tommasi, Tatiana AU - Quadrianto, Novi AU - Caputo, Barbara AU - Lampert, Christoph ID - 2948 TI - Beyond dataset bias: Multi-task unaligned shared knowledge transfer VL - 7724 ER - TY - CONF AB - Efficient zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge (ZK-PoK) are basic building blocks of many practical cryptographic applications such as identification schemes, group signatures, and secure multiparty computation. Currently, first applications that critically rely on ZK-PoKs are being deployed in the real world. The most prominent example is Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA), which was adopted by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) and implemented as one of the functionalities of the cryptographic Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip. Implementing systems using ZK-PoK turns out to be challenging, since ZK-PoK are, loosely speaking, significantly more complex than standard crypto primitives, such as encryption and signature schemes. As a result, implementation cycles of ZK-PoK are time-consuming and error-prone, in particular for developers with minor or no cryptographic skills. In this paper we report on our ongoing and future research vision with the goal to bring ZK-PoK to practice by making them accessible to crypto and security engineers. To this end we are developing compilers and related tools that support and partially automate the design, implementation, verification and secure implementation of ZK-PoK protocols. AU - Bangerter, Endre AU - Barzan, Stefania AU - Stephan Krenn AU - Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza AU - Schneider, Thomas AU - Tsay, Joe-Kai ED - Christianson, Bruce ED - Malcolm, James A. ED - Matyas, Vashek ED - Roe, Michael ID - 2973 TI - Bringing Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Knowledge to Practice VL - 7028 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Multithreaded programs coordinate their interaction through synchronization primitives like mutexes and semaphores, which are managed by an OS-provided resource manager. We propose algorithms for the automatic construction of code-aware resource managers for multithreaded embedded applications. Such managers use knowledge about the structure and resource usage (mutex and semaphore usage) of the threads to guarantee deadlock freedom and progress while managing resources in an efficient way. Our algorithms compute managers as winning strategies in certain infinite games, and produce a compact code description of these strategies. We have implemented the algorithms in the tool Cynthesis. Given a multithreaded program in C, the tool produces C code implementing a code-aware resource manager. We show in experiments that Cynthesis produces compact resource managers within a few minutes on a set of embedded benchmarks with up to 6 threads. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - De Alfaro, Luca AU - Faella, Marco AU - Majumdar, Ritankar AU - Raman, Vishwanath ID - 3116 IS - 2 JF - Formal Methods in System Design TI - Code aware resource management VL - 42 ER - TY - JOUR AB - The fact that a sum of isotropic Gaussian kernels can have more modes than kernels is surprising. Extra (ghost) modes do not exist in ℝ1 and are generally not well studied in higher dimensions. We study a configuration of n+1 Gaussian kernels for which there are exactly n+2 modes. We show that all modes lie on a finite set of lines, which we call axes, and study the restriction of the Gaussian mixture to these axes in order to discover that there are an exponential number of critical points in this configuration. Although the existence of ghost modes remained unknown due to the difficulty of finding examples in ℝ2, we show that the resilience of ghost modes grows like the square root of the dimension. In addition, we exhibit finite configurations of isotropic Gaussian kernels with superlinearly many modes. AU - Edelsbrunner, Herbert AU - Fasy, Brittany Terese AU - Rote, Günter ID - 2815 IS - 4 JF - Discrete & Computational Geometry SN - 0179-5376 TI - Add isotropic Gaussian kernels at own risk: More and more resilient modes in higher dimensions VL - 49 ER - TY - JOUR AB - In this paper, we present the first output-sensitive algorithm to compute the persistence diagram of a filtered simplicial complex. For any Γ > 0, it returns only those homology classes with persistence at least Γ. Instead of the classical reduction via column operations, our algorithm performs rank computations on submatrices of the boundary matrix. For an arbitrary constant δ ∈ (0, 1), the running time is O (C (1 - δ) Γ R d (n) log n), where C (1 - δ) Γ is the number of homology classes with persistence at least (1 - δ) Γ, n is the total number of simplices in the complex, d its dimension, and R d (n) is the complexity of computing the rank of an n × n matrix with O (d n) nonzero entries. Depending on the choice of the rank algorithm, this yields a deterministic O (C (1 - δ) Γ n 2.376) algorithm, an O (C (1 - δ) Γ n 2.28) Las-Vegas algorithm, or an O (C (1 - δ) Γ n 2 + ε{lunate}) Monte-Carlo algorithm for an arbitrary ε{lunate} > 0. The space complexity of the Monte-Carlo version is bounded by O (d n) = O (n log n). AU - Chen, Chao AU - Kerber, Michael ID - 2939 IS - 4 JF - Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications TI - An output sensitive algorithm for persistent homology VL - 46 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Copper-based selenides are attracting increasing interest due to their outstanding optoelectronic and thermoelectric properties. Herein a novel colloidal synthetic route to prepare Cu2SnSe3 nanocrystals with controlled size, shape and composition is presented. The high yield of the developed procedure allowed its up-scaling to the production of grams of colloidal Cu2SnSe3 nanocrystals. These nanocrystals were used as building blocks for the production of Cu2SnSe3 bulk nanostructured materials by spark plasma sintering. The thermoelectric properties of the prepared nanocrystalline Cu2SnSe3 pellets were characterized in the temperature range from 300 to 720 K. The obtained results show the bottom-up production of nanocrystalline materials from solution-processed nanocrystals to be a potentially advantageous alternative to conventional methods of production of efficient thermoelectric materials. AU - Ibáñez, Maria AU - Cadavid, Doris AU - Anselmi Tamburini, Umberto AU - Zamani, Reza AU - Gorsse, Stéphane AU - Li, Wenhua AU - López, Antonio AU - Morante, Joan AU - Arbiol, Jordi AU - Cabot, Andreu ID - 344 IS - 4 JF - Journal of Materials Chemistry A TI - Colloidal synthesis and thermoelectric properties of Cu 2SnSe3 nanocrystals VL - 1 ER - TY - JOUR AB - The presence of organic ligands on the surface of colloidal nanoparticles strongly limits their performance in technological applications where charge carrier transfer/transport plays an important role. We use metal salts, matched with the nanoparticle composition, to eliminate the surface organic ligands without introducing extrinsic impurities in the final nanomaterial. The potential of the simple, general and scalable processes presented here is demonstrated by characterizing the thermoelectric properties of nanostructured Ag2Te produced by the bottom up assembly of Ag2Te nanocrystals. A 6-fold increase of the thermoelectric figure of merit of Ag2Te was obtained when organic ligands were displaced by AgNO3. The same procedure can enhance the performance of nanocrystals and nanocrystal-based devices in a broad range of applications, from photovoltaics and thermoelectrics to catalysis. AU - Cadavid, Doris AU - Ibáñez, Maria AU - Shavel, Alexey AU - Durá, Oscar AU - López De La Torre, Marco AU - Cabot, Andreu ID - 352 IS - 15 JF - Journal of Materials Chemistry A TI - Organic ligand displacement by metal salts to enhance nanoparticle functionality: Thermoelectric properties of Ag inf 2 inf Te VL - 1 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Until recently, to prepare nanocrystals of a new material, scientists searched their shelves for the appropriate molecular precursors, surfactants, and solvents. They then optimized the reaction conditions for the atoms to self-assemble into monodisperse nanocrystals (1). This approach is being replaced by a simpler strategy, in which preformed nanocrystals serve as templates to produce nanoparticles with a different composition through chemical transformation. On page 964 of this issue, Oh et al. (2) report a powerful mechanism that allows the composition of oxide nanoparticles to be transformed in solution and at low temperatures. AU - Ibáñez, Maria AU - Cabot, Andreu ID - 378 IS - 6135 JF - Science TI - All change for nanocrystals VL - 340 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Cells in a developing embryo have no direct way of "measuring" their physical position. Through a variety of processes, however, the expression levels of multiple genes come to be correlated with position, and these expression levels thus form a code for "positional information." We show how to measure this information, in bits, using the gap genes in the Drosophila embryo as an example. Individual genes carry nearly two bits of information, twice as much as expected if the expression patterns consisted only of on/off domains separated by sharp boundaries. Taken together, four gap genes carry enough information to define a cell's location with an error bar of ~1% along the anterior-posterior axis of the embryo. This precision is nearly enough for each cell to have a unique identity, which is the maximum information the system can use, and is nearly constant along the length of the embryo. We argue that this constancy is a signature of optimality in the transmission of information from primary morphogen inputs to the output of the gap gene network. AU - Dubuis, Julien AU - Tkacik, Gasper AU - Wieschaus, Eric AU - Gregor, Thomas AU - Bialek, William ID - 3261 IS - 41 JF - PNAS TI - Positional information, in bits VL - 110 ER -