TY - CONF AB - We discus noise channels in coherent electro-optic up-conversion between microwave and optical fields, in particular due to optical heating. We also report on a novel configuration, which promises to be flexible and highly efficient. AU - Lambert, Nicholas J. AU - Mobassem, Sonia AU - Rueda Sanchez, Alfredo R AU - Schwefel, Harald G.L. ID - 10328 SN - 9-781-5575-2820-9 T2 - OSA Quantum 2.0 Conference TI - New designs and noise channels in electro-optic microwave to optical up-conversion ER - TY - CONF AB - The search for biologically faithful synaptic plasticity rules has resulted in a large body of models. They are usually inspired by – and fitted to – experimental data, but they rarely produce neural dynamics that serve complex functions. These failures suggest that current plasticity models are still under-constrained by existing data. Here, we present an alternative approach that uses meta-learning to discover plausible synaptic plasticity rules. Instead of experimental data, the rules are constrained by the functions they implement and the structure they are meant to produce. Briefly, we parameterize synaptic plasticity rules by a Volterra expansion and then use supervised learning methods (gradient descent or evolutionary strategies) to minimize a problem-dependent loss function that quantifies how effectively a candidate plasticity rule transforms an initially random network into one with the desired function. We first validate our approach by re-discovering previously described plasticity rules, starting at the single-neuron level and “Oja’s rule”, a simple Hebbian plasticity rule that captures the direction of most variability of inputs to a neuron (i.e., the first principal component). We expand the problem to the network level and ask the framework to find Oja’s rule together with an anti-Hebbian rule such that an initially random two-layer firing-rate network will recover several principal components of the input space after learning. Next, we move to networks of integrate-and-fire neurons with plastic inhibitory afferents. We train for rules that achieve a target firing rate by countering tuned excitation. Our algorithm discovers a specific subset of the manifold of rules that can solve this task. Our work is a proof of principle of an automated and unbiased approach to unveil synaptic plasticity rules that obey biological constraints and can solve complex functions. AU - Confavreux, Basile J AU - Zenke, Friedemann AU - Agnes, Everton J. AU - Lillicrap, Timothy AU - Vogels, Tim P ID - 9633 SN - 1049-5258 T2 - Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems TI - A meta-learning approach to (re)discover plasticity rules that carve a desired function into a neural network VL - 33 ER - TY - JOUR AB - The widely used non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are derivatives of the phytohormone salicylic acid (SA). SA is well known to regulate plant immunity and development, whereas there have been few reports focusing on the effects of NSAIDs in plants. Our studies here reveal that NSAIDs exhibit largely overlapping physiological activities to SA in the model plant Arabidopsis. NSAID treatments lead to shorter and agravitropic primary roots and inhibited lateral root organogenesis. Notably, in addition to the SA-like action, which in roots involves binding to the protein phosphatase 2A (PP2A), NSAIDs also exhibit PP2A-independent effects. Cell biological and biochemical analyses reveal that many NSAIDs bind directly to and inhibit the chaperone activity of TWISTED DWARF1, thereby regulating actin cytoskeleton dynamics and subsequent endosomal trafficking. Our findings uncover an unexpected bioactivity of human pharmaceuticals in plants and provide insights into the molecular mechanism underlying the cellular action of this class of anti-inflammatory compounds. AU - Tan, Shutang AU - Di Donato, Martin AU - Glanc, Matous AU - Zhang, Xixi AU - Klíma, Petr AU - Liu, Jie AU - Bailly, Aurélien AU - Ferro, Noel AU - Petrášek, Jan AU - Geisler, Markus AU - Friml, Jiří ID - 8943 IS - 9 JF - Cell Reports TI - Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs target TWISTED DWARF1-regulated actin dynamics and auxin transport-mediated plant development VL - 33 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Pulsating flows through tubular geometries are laminar provided that velocities are moderate. This in particular is also believed to apply to cardiovascular flows where inertial forces are typically too low to sustain turbulence. On the other hand, flow instabilities and fluctuating shear stresses are held responsible for a variety of cardiovascular diseases. Here we report a nonlinear instability mechanism for pulsating pipe flow that gives rise to bursts of turbulence at low flow rates. Geometrical distortions of small, yet finite, amplitude are found to excite a state consisting of helical vortices during flow deceleration. The resulting flow pattern grows rapidly in magnitude, breaks down into turbulence, and eventually returns to laminar when the flow accelerates. This scenario causes shear stress fluctuations and flow reversal during each pulsation cycle. Such unsteady conditions can adversely affect blood vessels and have been shown to promote inflammation and dysfunction of the shear stress-sensitive endothelial cell layer. AU - Xu, Duo AU - Varshney, Atul AU - Ma, Xingyu AU - Song, Baofang AU - Riedl, Michael AU - Avila, Marc AU - Hof, Björn ID - 7932 IS - 21 JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America SN - 00278424 TI - Nonlinear hydrodynamic instability and turbulence in pulsatile flow VL - 117 ER - TY - JOUR AB - We study the unique solution m of the Dyson equation \( -m(z)^{-1} = z\1 - a + S[m(z)] \) on a von Neumann algebra A with the constraint Imm≥0. Here, z lies in the complex upper half-plane, a is a self-adjoint element of A and S is a positivity-preserving linear operator on A. We show that m is the Stieltjes transform of a compactly supported A-valued measure on R. Under suitable assumptions, we establish that this measure has a uniformly 1/3-Hölder continuous density with respect to the Lebesgue measure, which is supported on finitely many intervals, called bands. In fact, the density is analytic inside the bands with a square-root growth at the edges and internal cubic root cusps whenever the gap between two bands vanishes. The shape of these singularities is universal and no other singularity may occur. We give a precise asymptotic description of m near the singular points. These asymptotics generalize the analysis at the regular edges given in the companion paper on the Tracy-Widom universality for the edge eigenvalue statistics for correlated random matrices [the first author et al., Ann. Probab. 48, No. 2, 963--1001 (2020; Zbl 1434.60017)] and they play a key role in the proof of the Pearcey universality at the cusp for Wigner-type matrices [G. Cipolloni et al., Pure Appl. Anal. 1, No. 4, 615--707 (2019; Zbl 07142203); the second author et al., Commun. Math. Phys. 378, No. 2, 1203--1278 (2020; Zbl 07236118)]. We also extend the finite dimensional band mass formula from [the first author et al., loc. cit.] to the von Neumann algebra setting by showing that the spectral mass of the bands is topologically rigid under deformations and we conclude that these masses are quantized in some important cases. AU - Alt, Johannes AU - Erdös, László AU - Krüger, Torben H ID - 14694 JF - Documenta Mathematica KW - General Mathematics SN - 1431-0635 TI - The Dyson equation with linear self-energy: Spectral bands, edges and cusps VL - 25 ER - TY - THES AB - We present solutions to several problems originating from geometry and discrete mathematics: existence of equipartitions, maps without Tverberg multiple points, and inscribing quadrilaterals. Equivariant obstruction theory is the natural topological approach to these type of questions. However, for the specific problems we consider it had yielded only partial or no results. We get our results by complementing equivariant obstruction theory with other techniques from topology and geometry. AU - Avvakumov, Sergey ID - 8156 SN - 2663-337X TI - Topological methods in geometry and discrete mathematics ER - TY - JOUR AB - We give the first mathematically rigorous justification of the local density approximation in density functional theory. We provide a quantitative estimate on the difference between the grand-canonical Levy–Lieb energy of a given density (the lowest possible energy of all quantum states having this density) and the integral over the uniform electron gas energy of this density. The error involves gradient terms and justifies the use of the local density approximation in the situation where the density is very flat on sufficiently large regions in space. AU - Lewin, Mathieu AU - Lieb, Elliott H. AU - Seiringer, Robert ID - 14891 IS - 1 JF - Pure and Applied Analysis SN - 2578-5893 TI - The local density approximation in density functional theory VL - 2 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) leads to a loss of specific motor neuron populations in the spinal cord and cortex. Emerging evidence suggests that interneurons may also be affected, but a detailed characterization of interneuron loss and its potential impacts on motor neuron loss and disease progression is lacking. To examine this issue, the fate of V1 inhibitory neurons during ALS was assessed in the ventral spinal cord using the SODG93A mouse model. The V1 population makes up ∼30% of all ventral inhibitory neurons, ∼50% of direct inhibitory synaptic contacts onto motor neuron cell bodies, and is thought to play a key role in modulating motor output, in part through recurrent and reciprocal inhibitory circuits. We find that approximately half of V1 inhibitory neurons are lost in SODG93A mice at late disease stages, but that this loss is delayed relative to the loss of motor neurons and V2a excitatory neurons. We further identify V1 subpopulations based on transcription factor expression that are differentially susceptible to degeneration in SODG93A mice. At an early disease stage, we show that V1 synaptic contacts with motor neuron cell bodies increase, suggesting an upregulation of inhibition before V1 neurons are lost in substantial numbers. These data support a model in which progressive changes in V1 synaptic contacts early in disease, and in select V1 subpopulations at later stages, represent a compensatory upregulation and then deleterious breakdown of specific interneuron circuits within the spinal cord. AU - Salamatina, Alina AU - Yang, Jerry H AU - Brenner-Morton, Susan AU - Bikoff, Jay B AU - Fang, Linjing AU - Kintner, Christopher R AU - Jessell, Thomas M AU - Sweeney, Lora Beatrice Jaeger ID - 8914 JF - Neuroscience SN - 0306-4522 TI - Differential loss of spinal interneurons in a mouse model of ALS VL - 450 ER - TY - DATA AB - This data collection contains the transport data for figures presented in the supplementary material of "Enhancement of Proximity Induced Superconductivity in Planar Germanium" by K. Aggarwal, et. al. The measurements were done using Labber Software and the data is stored in the hdf5 file format. The files can be opened using either the Labber Log Browser (https://labber.org/overview/) or Labber Python API (http://labber.org/online-doc/api/LogFile.html). AU - Katsaros, Georgios ID - 8834 TI - Enhancement of proximity induced superconductivity in planar Germanium ER - TY - DATA AB - Antibiotics that interfere with translation, when combined, interact in diverse and difficult-to-predict ways. Here, we explain these interactions by "translation bottlenecks": points in the translation cycle where antibiotics block ribosomal progression. To elucidate the underlying mechanisms of drug interactions between translation inhibitors, we generate translation bottlenecks genetically using inducible control of translation factors that regulate well-defined translation cycle steps. These perturbations accurately mimic antibiotic action and drug interactions, supporting that the interplay of different translation bottlenecks causes these interactions. We further show that growth laws, combined with drug uptake and binding kinetics, enable the direct prediction of a large fraction of observed interactions, yet fail to predict suppression. However, varying two translation bottlenecks simultaneously supports that dense traffic of ribosomes and competition for translation factors account for the previously unexplained suppression. These results highlight the importance of "continuous epistasis" in bacterial physiology. AU - Kavcic, Bor ID - 8097 KW - Escherichia coli KW - antibiotic combinations KW - translation KW - growth laws KW - drug interactions KW - bacterial physiology KW - translation inhibitors TI - Analysis scripts and research data for the paper "Mechanisms of drug interactions between translation-inhibiting antibiotics" ER - TY - DATA AB - Here are the research data underlying the publication "Estimating inbreeding and its effects in a long-term study of snapdragons (Antirrhinum majus)". Further information are summed up in the README document. The files for this record have been updated and are now found in the linked DOI https://doi.org/10.15479/AT:ISTA:9192. AU - Arathoon, Louise S ID - 8254 TI - Estimating inbreeding and its effects in a long-term study of snapdragons (Antirrhinum majus) ER - TY - JOUR AB - Semiconductor nanowires have been playing a crucial role in the development of nanoscale devices for the realization of spin qubits, Majorana fermions, single photon emitters, nanoprocessors, etc. The monolithic growth of site‐controlled nanowires is a prerequisite toward the next generation of devices that will require addressability and scalability. Here, combining top‐down nanofabrication and bottom‐up self‐assembly, the growth of Ge wires on prepatterned Si (001) substrates with controllable position, distance, length, and structure is reported. This is achieved by a novel growth process that uses a SiGe strain‐relaxation template and can be potentially generalized to other material combinations. Transport measurements show an electrically tunable spin–orbit coupling, with a spin–orbit length similar to that of III–V materials. Also, charge sensing between quantum dots in closely spaced wires is observed, which underlines their potential for the realization of advanced quantum devices. The reported results open a path toward scalable qubit devices using nanowires on silicon. AU - Gao, Fei AU - Wang, Jian-Huan AU - Watzinger, Hannes AU - Hu, Hao AU - Rančić, Marko J. AU - Zhang, Jie-Yin AU - Wang, Ting AU - Yao, Yuan AU - Wang, Gui-Lei AU - Kukucka, Josip AU - Vukušić, Lada AU - Kloeffel, Christoph AU - Loss, Daniel AU - Liu, Feng AU - Katsaros, Georgios AU - Zhang, Jian-Jun ID - 7541 IS - 16 JF - Advanced Materials SN - 0935-9648 TI - Site-controlled uniform Ge/Si hut wires with electrically tunable spin-orbit coupling VL - 32 ER - TY - DATA AB - Phenomenological relations such as Ohm’s or Fourier’s law have a venerable history in physics but are still scarce in biology. This situation restrains predictive theory. Here, we build on bacterial “growth laws,” which capture physiological feedback between translation and cell growth, to construct a minimal biophysical model for the combined action of ribosome-targeting antibiotics. Our model predicts drug interactions like antagonism or synergy solely from responses to individual drugs. We provide analytical results for limiting cases, which agree well with numerical results. We systematically refine the model by including direct physical interactions of different antibiotics on the ribosome. In a limiting case, our model provides a mechanistic underpinning for recent predictions of higher-order interactions that were derived using entropy maximization. We further refine the model to include the effects of antibiotics that mimic starvation and the presence of resistance genes. We describe the impact of a starvation-mimicking antibiotic on drug interactions analytically and verify it experimentally. Our extended model suggests a change in the type of drug interaction that depends on the strength of resistance, which challenges established rescaling paradigms. We experimentally show that the presence of unregulated resistance genes can lead to altered drug interaction, which agrees with the prediction of the model. While minimal, the model is readily adaptable and opens the door to predicting interactions of second and higher-order in a broad range of biological systems. AU - Kavcic, Bor ID - 8930 KW - Escherichia coli KW - antibiotic combinations KW - translation KW - growth laws KW - drug interactions KW - bacterial physiology KW - translation inhibitors TI - Analysis scripts and research data for the paper "Minimal biophysical model of combined antibiotic action" ER - TY - DATA AB - Gene expression levels are influenced by multiple coexisting molecular mechanisms. Some of these interactions, such as those of transcription factors and promoters have been studied extensively. However, predicting phenotypes of gene regulatory networks remains a major challenge. Here, we use a well-defined synthetic gene regulatory network to study how network phenotypes depend on local genetic context, i.e. the genetic neighborhood of a transcription factor and its relative position. We show that one gene regulatory network with fixed topology can display not only quantitatively but also qualitatively different phenotypes, depending solely on the local genetic context of its components. Our results demonstrate that changes in local genetic context can place a single transcriptional unit within two separate regulons without the need for complex regulatory sequences. We propose that relative order of individual transcriptional units, with its potential for combinatorial complexity, plays an important role in shaping phenotypes of gene regulatory networks. AU - Nagy-Staron, Anna A ID - 8951 KW - Gene regulatory networks KW - Gene expression KW - Escherichia coli KW - Synthetic Biology TI - Sequences of gene regulatory network permutations for the article "Local genetic context shapes the function of a gene regulatory network" ER - TY - DATA AB - Organisms cope with change by employing transcriptional regulators. However, when faced with rare environments, the evolution of transcriptional regulators and their promoters may be too slow. We ask whether the intrinsic instability of gene duplication and amplification provides a generic alternative to canonical gene regulation. By real-time monitoring of gene copy number mutations in E. coli, we show that gene duplications and amplifications enable adaptation to fluctuating environments by rapidly generating copy number, and hence expression level, polymorphism. This ‘amplification-mediated gene expression tuning’ occurs on timescales similar to canonical gene regulation and can deal with rapid environmental changes. Mathematical modeling shows that amplifications also tune gene expression in stochastic environments where transcription factor-based schemes are hard to evolve or maintain. The fleeting nature of gene amplifications gives rise to a generic population-level mechanism that relies on genetic heterogeneity to rapidly tune expression of any gene, without leaving any genomic signature. AU - Grah, Rok ID - 7383 KW - Matlab scripts KW - analysis of microfluidics KW - mathematical model TI - Matlab scripts for the Paper: Gene Amplification as a Form of Population-Level Gene Expression regulation ER - TY - DATA AU - Katsaros, Georgios ID - 9222 TI - Transport data for: Site‐controlled uniform Ge/Si Hut wires with electrically tunable spin–orbit coupling ER - TY - THES AB - Fabrication of curved shells plays an important role in modern design, industry, and science. Among their remarkable properties are, for example, aesthetics of organic shapes, ability to evenly distribute loads, or efficient flow separation. They find applications across vast length scales ranging from sky-scraper architecture to microscopic devices. But, at the same time, the design of curved shells and their manufacturing process pose a variety of challenges. In this thesis, they are addressed from several perspectives. In particular, this thesis presents approaches based on the transformation of initially flat sheets into the target curved surfaces. This involves problems of interactive design of shells with nontrivial mechanical constraints, inverse design of complex structural materials, and data-driven modeling of delicate and time-dependent physical properties. At the same time, two newly-developed self-morphing mechanisms targeting flat-to-curved transformation are presented. In architecture, doubly curved surfaces can be realized as cold bent glass panelizations. Originally flat glass panels are bent into frames and remain stressed. This is a cost-efficient fabrication approach compared to hot bending, when glass panels are shaped plastically. However such constructions are prone to breaking during bending, and it is highly nontrivial to navigate the design space, keeping the panels fabricable and aesthetically pleasing at the same time. We introduce an interactive design system for cold bent glass façades, while previously even offline optimization for such scenarios has not been sufficiently developed. Our method is based on a deep learning approach providing quick and high precision estimation of glass panel shape and stress while handling the shape multimodality. Fabrication of smaller objects of scales below 1 m, can also greatly benefit from shaping originally flat sheets. In this respect, we designed new self-morphing shell mechanisms transforming from an initial flat state to a doubly curved state with high precision and detail. Our so-called CurveUps demonstrate the encodement of the geometric information into the shell. Furthermore, we explored the frontiers of programmable materials and showed how temporal information can additionally be encoded into a flat shell. This allows prescribing deformation sequences for doubly curved surfaces and, thus, facilitates self-collision avoidance enabling complex shapes and functionalities otherwise impossible. Both of these methods include inverse design tools keeping the user in the design loop. AU - Guseinov, Ruslan ID - 8366 KW - computer-aided design KW - shape modeling KW - self-morphing KW - mechanical engineering SN - 2663-337X TI - Computational design of curved thin shells: From glass façades to programmable matter ER - TY - JOUR AB - Cold bent glass is a promising and cost-efficient method for realizing doubly curved glass facades. They are produced by attaching planar glass sheets to curved frames and require keeping the occurring stress within safe limits. However, it is very challenging to navigate the design space of cold bent glass panels due to the fragility of the material, which impedes the form-finding for practically feasible and aesthetically pleasing cold bent glass facades. We propose an interactive, data-driven approach for designing cold bent glass facades that can be seamlessly integrated into a typical architectural design pipeline. Our method allows non-expert users to interactively edit a parametric surface while providing real-time feedback on the deformed shape and maximum stress of cold bent glass panels. Designs are automatically refined to minimize several fairness criteria while maximal stresses are kept within glass limits. We achieve interactive frame rates by using a differentiable Mixture Density Network trained from more than a million simulations. Given a curved boundary, our regression model is capable of handling multistable configurations and accurately predicting the equilibrium shape of the panel and its corresponding maximal stress. We show predictions are highly accurate and validate our results with a physical realization of a cold bent glass surface. AU - Gavriil, Konstantinos AU - Guseinov, Ruslan AU - Perez Rodriguez, Jesus AU - Pellis, Davide AU - Henderson, Paul M AU - Rist, Florian AU - Pottmann, Helmut AU - Bickel, Bernd ID - 8562 IS - 6 JF - ACM Transactions on Graphics SN - 0730-0301 TI - Computational design of cold bent glass façades VL - 39 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Using inelastic cotunneling spectroscopy we observe a zero field splitting within the spin triplet manifold of Ge hut wire quantum dots. The states with spin ±1 in the confinement direction are energetically favored by up to 55 μeV compared to the spin 0 triplet state because of the strong spin–orbit coupling. The reported effect should be observable in a broad class of strongly confined hole quantum-dot systems and might need to be considered when operating hole spin qubits. AU - Katsaros, Georgios AU - Kukucka, Josip AU - Vukušić, Lada AU - Watzinger, Hannes AU - Gao, Fei AU - Wang, Ting AU - Zhang, Jian-Jun AU - Held, Karsten ID - 8203 IS - 7 JF - Nano Letters SN - 1530-6984 TI - Zero field splitting of heavy-hole states in quantum dots VL - 20 ER - TY - JOUR AB - In vitro work revealed that excitatory synaptic inputs to hippocampal inhibitory interneurons could undergo Hebbian, associative, or non-associative plasticity. Both behavioral and learning-dependent reorganization of these connections has also been demonstrated by measuring spike transmission probabilities in pyramidal cell-interneuron spike cross-correlations that indicate monosynaptic connections. Here we investigated the activity-dependent modification of these connections during exploratory behavior in rats by optogenetically inhibiting pyramidal cell and interneuron subpopulations. Light application and associated firing alteration of pyramidal and interneuron populations led to lasting changes in pyramidal-interneuron connection weights as indicated by spike transmission changes. Spike transmission alterations were predicted by the light-mediated changes in the number of pre- and postsynaptic spike pairing events and by firing rate changes of interneurons but not pyramidal cells. This work demonstrates the presence of activity-dependent associative and non-associative reorganization of pyramidal-interneuron connections triggered by the optogenetic modification of the firing rate and spike synchrony of cells. AU - Gridchyn, Igor AU - Schönenberger, Philipp AU - O'Neill, Joseph AU - Csicsvari, Jozsef L ID - 8740 JF - eLife TI - Optogenetic inhibition-mediated activity-dependent modification of CA1 pyramidal-interneuron connections during behavior VL - 9 ER - TY - DATA AB - Supplementary movies showing the following sequences for spatio-temporarily programmed shells: input geometry and actuation time landscape; comparison of morphing processes from a camera recording and a simulation; final actuated shape. AU - Guseinov, Ruslan ID - 8375 TI - Supplementary data for "Computational design of curved thin shells: from glass façades to programmable matter" ER - TY - DATA AB - These are the supplementary research data to the publication "Zero field splitting of heavy-hole states in quantum dots". All matrix files have the same format. Within each column the bias voltage is changed. Each column corresponds to either a different gate voltage or magnetic field. The voltage values are given in mV, the current values in pA. Find a specific description in the included Readme file. AU - Katsaros, Georgios ID - 7689 TI - Supplementary data for "Zero field splitting of heavy-hole states in quantum dots" ER - TY - DATA AU - Guseinov, Ruslan ID - 8761 TI - Supplementary data for "Computational design of cold bent glass façades" ER - TY - DATA AB - Supplementary data provided for the provided for the publication: Igor Gridchyn , Philipp Schoenenberger , Joseph O'Neill , Jozsef Csicsvari (2020) Optogenetic inhibition-mediated activity-dependent modification of CA1 pyramidal-interneuron connections during behavior. Elife. AU - Csicsvari, Jozsef L AU - Gridchyn, Igor AU - Schönenberger, Philipp ID - 8563 TI - Optogenetic alteration of hippocampal network activity ER - TY - JOUR AB - Advances in shape-morphing materials, such as hydrogels, shape-memory polymers and light-responsive polymers have enabled prescribing self-directed deformations of initially flat geometries. However, most proposed solutions evolve towards a target geometry without considering time-dependent actuation paths. To achieve more complex geometries and avoid self-collisions, it is critical to encode a spatial and temporal shape evolution within the initially flat shell. Recent realizations of time-dependent morphing are limited to the actuation of few, discrete hinges and cannot form doubly curved surfaces. Here, we demonstrate a method for encoding temporal shape evolution in architected shells that assume complex shapes and doubly curved geometries. The shells are non-periodic tessellations of pre-stressed contractile unit cells that soften in water at rates prescribed locally by mesostructure geometry. The ensuing midplane contraction is coupled to the formation of encoded curvatures. We propose an inverse design tool based on a data-driven model for unit cells’ temporal responses. AU - Guseinov, Ruslan AU - McMahan, Connor AU - Perez Rodriguez, Jesus AU - Daraio, Chiara AU - Bickel, Bernd ID - 7262 JF - Nature Communications KW - Design KW - Synthesis and processing KW - Mechanical engineering KW - Polymers SN - 2041-1723 TI - Programming temporal morphing of self-actuated shells VL - 11 ER - TY - DATA AB - Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) of cellular specimens provides insights into biological processes and structures within a native context. However, a major challenge still lies in the efficient and reproducible preparation of adherent cells for subsequent cryo-EM analysis. This is due to the sensitivity of many cellular specimens to the varying seeding and culturing conditions required for EM experiments, the often limited amount of cellular material and also the fragility of EM grids and their substrate. Here, we present low-cost and reusable 3D printed grid holders, designed to improve specimen preparation when culturing challenging cellular samples directly on grids. The described grid holders increase cell culture reproducibility and throughput, and reduce the resources required for cell culturing. We show that grid holders can be integrated into various cryo-EM workflows, including micro-patterning approaches to control cell seeding on grids, and for generating samples for cryo-focused ion beam milling and cryo-electron tomography experiments. Their adaptable design allows for the generation of specialized grid holders customized to a large variety of applications. AU - Schur, Florian KM ID - 14592 TI - STL-files for 3D-printed grid holders described in Fäßler F, Zens B, et al.; 3D printed cell culture grid holders for improved cellular specimen preparation in cryo-electron microscopy ER - TY - CONF AB - Persistent homology is a powerful tool in Topological Data Analysis (TDA) to capture the topological properties of data succinctly at different spatial resolutions. For graphical data, the shape, and structure of the neighborhood of individual data items (nodes) are an essential means of characterizing their properties. We propose the use of persistent homology methods to capture structural and topological properties of graphs and use it to address the problem of link prediction. We achieve encouraging results on nine different real-world datasets that attest to the potential of persistent homology-based methods for network analysis. AU - Bhatia, Sumit AU - Chatterjee, Bapi AU - Nathani, Deepak AU - Kaul, Manohar ID - 7213 SN - 1860949X T2 - Complex Networks and their applications VIII TI - A persistent homology perspective to the link prediction problem VL - 881 ER - TY - CONF AB - In this paper, we present the first Asynchronous Distributed Key Generation (ADKG) algorithm which is also the first distributed key generation algorithm that can generate cryptographic keys with a dual (f,2f+1)-threshold (where f is the number of faulty parties). As a result, using our ADKG we remove the trusted setup assumption that the most scalable consensus algorithms make. In order to create a DKG with a dual (f,2f+1)- threshold we first answer in the affirmative the open question posed by Cachin et al. [7] on how to create an Asynchronous Verifiable Secret Sharing (AVSS) protocol with a reconstruction threshold of f+1 0$. Based on the recent work of Ghaffari et al. [FOCS'18], this additive $O(\log\log n)$ factor is conditionally essential. These algorithms can also be shown to run in $O(\log \Delta)$ rounds in the closely related model of CONGESTED CLIQUE, improving upon the state-of-the-art bound of $O(\log^2 \Delta)$ rounds by Censor-Hillel et al. [DISC'17]. AU - Czumaj, Artur AU - Davies, Peter AU - Parter, Merav ID - 7802 IS - 7 T2 - Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA 2020) TI - Graph sparsification for derandomizing massively parallel computation with low space ER - TY - CONF AB - Balanced search trees typically use key comparisons to guide their operations, and achieve logarithmic running time. By relying on numerical properties of the keys, interpolation search achieves lower search complexity and better performance. Although interpolation-based data structures were investigated in the past, their non-blocking concurrent variants have received very little attention so far. In this paper, we propose the first non-blocking implementation of the classic interpolation search tree (IST) data structure. For arbitrary key distributions, the data structure ensures worst-case O(log n + p) amortized time for search, insertion and deletion traversals. When the input key distributions are smooth, lookups run in expected O(log log n + p) time, and insertion and deletion run in expected amortized O(log log n + p) time, where p is a bound on the number of threads. To improve the scalability of concurrent insertion and deletion, we propose a novel parallel rebuilding technique, which should be of independent interest. We evaluate whether the theoretical improvements translate to practice by implementing the concurrent interpolation search tree, and benchmarking it on uniform and nonuniform key distributions, for dataset sizes in the millions to billions of keys. Relative to the state-of-the-art concurrent data structures, the concurrent interpolation search tree achieves performance improvements of up to 15% under high update rates, and of up to 50% under moderate update rates. Further, ISTs exhibit up to 2X less cache-misses, and consume 1.2 -- 2.6X less memory compared to the next best alternative on typical dataset sizes. We find that the results are surprisingly robust to distributional skew, which suggests that our data structure can be a promising alternative to classic concurrent search structures. AU - Brown, Trevor A AU - Prokopec, Aleksandar AU - Alistarh, Dan-Adrian ID - 7636 SN - 9781450368186 T2 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming TI - Non-blocking interpolation search trees with doubly-logarithmic running time ER - TY - CONF AB - There has been a significant amount of research on hardware and software support for efficient concurrent data structures; yet, the question of how to build correct, simple, and scalable data structures has not yet been definitively settled. In this paper, we revisit this question from a minimalist perspective, and ask: what is the smallest amount of synchronization required for correct and efficient concurrent search data structures, and how could this minimal synchronization support be provided in hardware? To address these questions, we introduce memory tagging, a simple hardware mechanism which enables the programmer to "tag" a dynamic set of memory locations, at cache-line granularity, and later validate whether the memory has been concurrently modified, with the possibility of updating one of the underlying locations atomically if validation succeeds. We provide several examples showing that this mechanism can enable fast and arguably simple concurrent data structure designs, such as lists, binary search trees, balanced search trees, range queries, and Software Transactional Memory (STM) implementations. We provide an implementation of memory tags in the Graphite multi-core simulator, showing that the mechanism can be implemented entirely at the level of L1 cache, and that it can enable non-trivial speedups versus existing implementations of the above data structures. AU - Alistarh, Dan-Adrian AU - Brown, Trevor A AU - Singhal, Nandini ID - 8191 IS - 7 SN - 9781450369350 T2 - Annual ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures TI - Memory tagging: Minimalist synchronization for scalable concurrent data structures ER - TY - CONF AB - Concurrent programming can be notoriously complex and error-prone. Programming bugs can arise from a variety of sources, such as operation re-reordering, or incomplete understanding of the memory model. A variety of formal and model checking methods have been developed to address this fundamental difficulty. While technically interesting, existing academic methods are still hard to apply to the large codebases typical of industrial deployments, which limits their practical impact. AU - Koval, Nikita AU - Sokolova, Mariia AU - Fedorov, Alexander AU - Alistarh, Dan-Adrian AU - Tsitelov, Dmitry ID - 7635 SN - 9781450368186 T2 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, PPOPP TI - Testing concurrency on the JVM with Lincheck ER - TY - CONF AB - We introduce extension-based proofs, a class of impossibility proofs that includes valency arguments. They are modelled as an interaction between a prover and a protocol. Using proofs based on combinatorial topology, it has been shown that it is impossible to deterministically solve k-set agreement among n > k ≥ 2 processes in a wait-free manner. However, it was unknown whether proofs based on simpler techniques were possible. We explain why this impossibility result cannot be obtained by an extension-based proof and, hence, extension-based proofs are limited in power. AU - Alistarh, Dan-Adrian AU - Aspnes, James AU - Ellen, Faith AU - Gelashvili, Rati AU - Zhu, Leqi ID - 8383 SN - 9781450375825 T2 - Proceedings of the 39th Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing TI - Brief Announcement: Why Extension-Based Proofs Fail ER - TY - JOUR AB - We present a method for animating yarn-level cloth effects using a thin-shell solver. We accomplish this through numerical homogenization: we first use a large number of yarn-level simulations to build a model of the potential energy density of the cloth, and then use this energy density function to compute forces in a thin shell simulator. We model several yarn-based materials, including both woven and knitted fabrics. Our model faithfully reproduces expected effects like the stiffness of woven fabrics, and the highly deformable nature and anisotropy of knitted fabrics. Our approach does not require any real-world experiments nor measurements; because the method is based entirely on simulations, it can generate entirely new material models quickly, without the need for testing apparatuses or human intervention. We provide data-driven models of several woven and knitted fabrics, which can be used for efficient simulation with an off-the-shelf cloth solver. AU - Sperl, Georg AU - Narain, Rahul AU - Wojtan, Christopher J ID - 8385 IS - 4 JF - ACM Transactions on Graphics SN - 07300301 TI - Homogenized yarn-level cloth VL - 39 ER - TY - JOUR AB - When short-range attractions are combined with long-range repulsions in colloidal particle systems, complex microphases can emerge. Here, we study a system of isotropic particles, which can form lamellar structures or a disordered fluid phase when temperature is varied. We show that, at equilibrium, the lamellar structure crystallizes, while out of equilibrium, the system forms a variety of structures at different shear rates and temperatures above melting. The shear-induced ordering is analyzed by means of principal component analysis and artificial neural networks, which are applied to data of reduced dimensionality. Our results reveal the possibility of inducing ordering by shear, potentially providing a feasible route to the fabrication of ordered lamellar structures from isotropic particles. AU - Pȩkalski, J. AU - Rzadkowski, Wojciech AU - Panagiotopoulos, A. Z. ID - 7956 IS - 20 JF - The Journal of chemical physics TI - Shear-induced ordering in systems with competing interactions: A machine learning study VL - 152 ER - TY - CONF AB - We present the first deterministic wait-free long-lived snapshot algorithm, using only read and write operations, that guarantees polylogarithmic amortized step complexity in all executions. This is the first non-blocking snapshot algorithm, using reads and writes only, that has sub-linear amortized step complexity in executions of arbitrary length. The key to our construction is a novel implementation of a 2-component max array object which may be of independent interest. AU - Baig, Mirza Ahad AU - Hendler, Danny AU - Milani, Alessia AU - Travers, Corentin ID - 8382 SN - 9781450375825 T2 - Proceedings of the 39th Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing TI - Long-lived snapshots with polylogarithmic amortized step complexity ER - TY - JOUR AB - In the superconducting regime of FeTe(1−x)Sex, there exist two types of vortices which are distinguished by the presence or absence of zero-energy states in their core. To understand their origin, we examine the interplay of Zeeman coupling and superconducting pairings in three-dimensional metals with band inversion. Weak Zeeman fields are found to suppress intraorbital spin-singlet pairing, known to localize the states at the ends of the vortices on the surface. On the other hand, an orbital-triplet pairing is shown to be stable against Zeeman interactions, but leads to delocalized zero-energy Majorana modes which extend through the vortex. In contrast, the finite-energy vortex modes remain localized at the vortex ends even when the pairing is of orbital-triplet form. Phenomenologically, this manifests as an observed disappearance of zero-bias peaks within the cores of topological vortices upon an increase of the applied magnetic field. The presence of magnetic impurities in FeTe(1−x)Sex, which are attracted to the vortices, would lead to such Zeeman-induced delocalization of Majorana modes in a fraction of vortices that capture a large enough number of magnetic impurities. Our results provide an explanation for the dichotomy between topological and nontopological vortices recently observed in FeTe(1−x)Sex. AU - Ghazaryan, Areg AU - Lopes, P. L.S. AU - Hosur, Pavan AU - Gilbert, Matthew J. AU - Ghaemi, Pouyan ID - 7428 IS - 2 JF - Physical Review B SN - 24699950 TI - Effect of Zeeman coupling on the Majorana vortex modes in iron-based topological superconductors VL - 101 ER - TY - JOUR AB - We demonstrate that releasing atoms into free space from an optical lattice does not deteriorate cavity-generated spin squeezing for metrological purposes. In this work, an ensemble of 500000 spin-squeezed atoms in a high-finesse optical cavity with near-uniform atom-cavity coupling is prepared, released into free space, recaptured in the cavity, and probed. Up to ∼10 dB of metrologically relevant squeezing is retrieved for 700μs free-fall times, and decaying levels of squeezing are realized for up to 3 ms free-fall times. The degradation of squeezing results from loss of atom-cavity coupling homogeneity between the initial squeezed state generation and final collective state readout. A theoretical model is developed to quantify this degradation and this model is experimentally validated. AU - Wu, Yunfan AU - Krishnakumar, Rajiv AU - Martínez-Rincón, Julián AU - Malia, Benjamin K. AU - Hosten, Onur AU - Kasevich, Mark A. ID - 8319 IS - 1 JF - Physical Review A SN - 24699926 TI - Retrieval of cavity-generated atomic spin squeezing after free-space release VL - 102 ER - TY - JOUR AB - The “procedural” approach to animating ocean waves is the dominant algorithm for animating larger bodies of water in interactive applications as well as in off-line productions — it provides high visual quality with a low computational demand. In this paper, we widen the applicability of procedural water wave animation with an extension that guarantees the satisfaction of boundary conditions imposed by terrain while still approximating physical wave behavior. In combination with a particle system that models wave breaking, foam, and spray, this allows us to naturally model waves interacting with beaches and rocks. Our system is able to animate waves at large scales at interactive frame rates on a commodity PC. AU - Jeschke, Stefan AU - Hafner, Christian AU - Chentanez, Nuttapong AU - Macklin, Miles AU - Müller-Fischer, Matthias AU - Wojtan, Christopher J ID - 8766 IS - 8 JF - Computer Graphics forum TI - Making procedural water waves boundary-aware VL - 39 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the defacto framework for sequential decision making in the presence of stochastic uncertainty. A classical optimization criterion for MDPs is to maximize the expected discounted-sum payoff, which ignores low probability catastrophic events with highly negative impact on the system. On the other hand, risk-averse policies require the probability of undesirable events to be below a given threshold, but they do not account for optimization of the expected payoff. We consider MDPs with discounted-sum payoff with failure states which represent catastrophic outcomes. The objective of risk-constrained planning is to maximize the expected discounted-sum payoff among risk-averse policies that ensure the probability to encounter a failure state is below a desired threshold. Our main contribution is an efficient risk-constrained planning algorithm that combines UCT-like search with a predictor learned through interaction with the MDP (in the style of AlphaZero) and with a risk-constrained action selection via linear programming. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with experiments on classical MDPs from the literature, including benchmarks with an order of 106 states. AU - Brázdil, Tomáš AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Novotný, Petr AU - Vahala, Jiří ID - 15055 IS - 06 JF - Proceedings of the 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence KW - General Medicine SN - 2374-3468 TI - Reinforcement learning of risk-constrained policies in Markov decision processes VL - 34 ER -