@article{2035, abstract = {Considering a continuous self-map and the induced endomorphism on homology, we study the eigenvalues and eigenspaces of the latter. Taking a filtration of representations, we define the persistence of the eigenspaces, effectively introducing a hierarchical organization of the map. The algorithm that computes this information for a finite sample is proved to be stable, and to give the correct answer for a sufficiently dense sample. Results computed with an implementation of the algorithm provide evidence of its practical utility. }, author = {Edelsbrunner, Herbert and Jablonski, Grzegorz and Mrozek, Marian}, journal = {Foundations of Computational Mathematics}, number = {5}, pages = {1213 -- 1244}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{The persistent homology of a self-map}}, doi = {10.1007/s10208-014-9223-y}, volume = {15}, year = {2015}, } @article{1874, abstract = {The hippocampal region, comprising the hippocampal formation and the parahippocampal region, has been one of the most intensively studied parts of the brain for decades. Better understanding of its functional diversity and complexity has led to an increased demand for specificity in experimental procedures and manipulations. In view of the complex 3D structure of the hippocampal region, precisely positioned experimental approaches require a fine-grained architectural description that is available and readable to experimentalists lacking detailed anatomical experience. In this paper, we provide the first cyto- and chemoarchitectural description of the hippocampal formation and parahippocampal region in the rat at high resolution and in the three standard sectional planes: coronal, horizontal and sagittal. The atlas uses a series of adjacent sections stained for neurons and for a number of chemical marker substances, particularly parvalbumin and calbindin. All the borders defined in one plane have been cross-checked against their counterparts in the other two planes. The entire dataset will be made available as a web-based interactive application through the Rodent Brain WorkBench (http://www.rbwb.org) which, together with this paper, provides a unique atlas resource.}, author = {Boccara, Charlotte and Kjønigsen, Lisa and Hammer, Ingvild and Bjaalie, Jan and Leergaard, Trygve and Witter, Menno}, journal = {Hippocampus}, number = {7}, pages = {838 -- 857}, publisher = {Wiley}, title = {{A three-plane architectonic atlas of the rat hippocampal region}}, doi = {10.1002/hipo.22407}, volume = {25}, year = {2015}, } @article{1878, abstract = {Petrocoptis is a small genus of chasmophytic plants endemic to the Iberian Peninsula, with some localized populations in the French Pyrenees. Within the genus, a dozen species have been recognized based on morphological diversity, most of them with limited distribution area, in small populations and frequently with potential threats to their survival. To date, however, a molecular evaluation of the current systematic treatments has not been carried out. The aim of the present study is to infer phylogenetic relationships among its subordinate taxa by using plastidial rps16 intron and nuclear internal transcribed spacer (ITS) DNA sequences; and evaluate the phylogenetic placement of the genus Petrocoptis within the family Caryophyllaceae. The monophyly of Petrocoptis is supported by both ITS and rps16 intron sequence analyses. Furthermore, time estimates using BEAST analyses indicate a Middle to Late Miocene diversification (10.59 Myr, 6.44–15.26 Myr highest posterior densities [HPD], for ITS; 14.30 Myr, 8.61–21.00 Myr HPD, for rps16 intron).}, author = {Cires Rodriguez, Eduardo and Prieto, José}, journal = {Journal of Plant Research}, number = {2}, pages = {223 -- 238}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Phylogenetic relationships of Petrocoptis A. Braun ex Endl. (Caryophyllaceae), a discussed genus from the Iberian Peninsula}}, doi = {10.1007/s10265-014-0691-6}, volume = {128}, year = {2015}, } @article{1879, abstract = {When electron microscopy (EM) was introduced in the 1930s it gave scientists their first look into the nanoworld of cells. Over the last 80 years EM has vastly increased our understanding of the complex cellular structures that underlie the diverse functions that cells need to maintain life. One drawback that has been difficult to overcome was the inherent lack of volume information, mainly due to the limit on the thickness of sections that could be viewed in a transmission electron microscope (TEM). For many years scientists struggled to achieve three-dimensional (3D) EM using serial section reconstructions, TEM tomography, and scanning EM (SEM) techniques such as freeze-fracture. Although each technique yielded some special information, they required a significant amount of time and specialist expertise to obtain even a very small 3D EM dataset. Almost 20 years ago scientists began to exploit SEMs to image blocks of embedded tissues and perform serial sectioning of these tissues inside the SEM chamber. Using first focused ion beams (FIB) and subsequently robotic ultramicrotomes (serial block-face, SBF-SEM) microscopists were able to collect large volumes of 3D EM information at resolutions that could address many important biological questions, and do so in an efficient manner. We present here some examples of 3D EM taken from the many diverse specimens that have been imaged in our core facility. We propose that the next major step forward will be to efficiently correlate functional information obtained using light microscopy (LM) with 3D EM datasets to more completely investigate the important links between cell structures and their functions.}, author = {Kremer, A and Lippens, Stefaan and Bartunkova, Sonia and Asselbergh, Bob and Blanpain, Cendric and Fendrych, Matyas and Goossens, A and Holt, Matthew and Janssens, Sophie and Krols, Michiel and Larsimont, Jean and Mc Guire, Conor and Nowack, Moritz and Saelens, Xavier and Schertel, Andreas and Schepens, B and Slezak, M and Timmerman, Vincent and Theunis, Clara and Van Brempt, Ronald and Visser, Y and Guérin, Christophe}, journal = {Journal of Microscopy}, number = {2}, pages = {80 -- 96}, publisher = {Wiley-Blackwell}, title = {{Developing 3D SEM in a broad biological context}}, doi = {10.1111/jmi.12211}, volume = {259}, year = {2015}, } @article{1880, abstract = {We investigate the relation between Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) and superfluidity in the ground state of a one-dimensional model of interacting bosons in a strong random potential. We prove rigorously that in a certain parameter regime the superfluid fraction can be arbitrarily small while complete BEC prevails. In another regime there is both complete BEC and complete superfluidity, despite the strong disorder}, author = {Könenberg, Martin and Moser, Thomas and Seiringer, Robert and Yngvason, Jakob}, journal = {New Journal of Physics}, publisher = {IOP Publishing}, title = {{Superfluid behavior of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a random potential}}, doi = {10.1088/1367-2630/17/1/013022}, volume = {17}, year = {2015}, } @inproceedings{1882, abstract = {We provide a framework for compositional and iterative design and verification of systems with quantitative information, such as rewards, time or energy. It is based on disjunctive modal transition systems where we allow actions to bear various types of quantitative information. Throughout the design process the actions can be further refined and the information made more precise. We show how to compute the results of standard operations on the systems, including the quotient (residual), which has not been previously considered for quantitative non-deterministic systems. Our quantitative framework has close connections to the modal nu-calculus and is compositional with respect to general notions of distances between systems and the standard operations.}, author = {Fahrenberg, Uli and Kretinsky, Jan and Legay, Axel and Traonouez, Louis}, location = {Bertinoro, Italy}, pages = {306 -- 324}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Compositionality for quantitative specifications}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-15317-9_19}, volume = {8997}, year = {2015}, } @article{1883, abstract = {We introduce a one-parametric family of tree growth models, in which branching probabilities decrease with branch age τ as τ-α. Depending on the exponent α, the scaling of tree depth with tree size n displays a transition between the logarithmic scaling of random trees and an algebraic growth. At the transition (α=1) tree depth grows as (logn)2. This anomalous scaling is in good agreement with the trend observed in evolution of biological species, thus providing a theoretical support for age-dependent speciation and associating it to the occurrence of a critical point. }, author = {Keller-Schmidt, Stephanie and Tugrul, Murat and Eguíluz, Víctor and Hernandez Garcia, Emilio and Klemm, Konstantin}, journal = {Physical Review E Statistical Nonlinear and Soft Matter Physics}, number = {2}, publisher = {American Institute of Physics}, title = {{Anomalous scaling in an age-dependent branching model}}, doi = {10.1103/PhysRevE.91.022803}, volume = {91}, year = {2015}, } @article{1885, abstract = {The concept of positional information is central to our understanding of how cells determine their location in a multicellular structure and thereby their developmental fates. Nevertheless, positional information has neither been defined mathematically nor quantified in a principled way. Here we provide an information-theoretic definition in the context of developmental gene expression patterns and examine the features of expression patterns that affect positional information quantitatively. We connect positional information with the concept of positional error and develop tools to directly measure information and error from experimental data. We illustrate our framework for the case of gap gene expression patterns in the early Drosophila embryo and show how information that is distributed among only four genes is sufficient to determine developmental fates with nearly single-cell resolution. Our approach can be generalized to a variety of different model systems; procedures and examples are discussed in detail. }, author = {Tkacik, Gasper and Dubuis, Julien and Petkova, Mariela and Gregor, Thomas}, journal = {Genetics}, number = {1}, pages = {39 -- 59}, publisher = {Genetics Society of America}, title = {{Positional information, positional error, and readout precision in morphogenesis: A mathematical framework}}, doi = {10.1534/genetics.114.171850}, volume = {199}, year = {2015}, } @article{1938, abstract = {We numerically investigate the distribution of extrema of 'chaotic' Laplacian eigenfunctions on two-dimensional manifolds. Our contribution is two-fold: (a) we count extrema on grid graphs with a small number of randomly added edges and show the behavior to coincide with the 1957 prediction of Longuet-Higgins for the continuous case and (b) we compute the regularity of their spatial distribution using discrepancy, which is a classical measure from the theory of Monte Carlo integration. The first part suggests that grid graphs with randomly added edges should behave like two-dimensional surfaces with ergodic geodesic flow; in the second part we show that the extrema are more regularly distributed in space than the grid Z2.}, author = {Pausinger, Florian and Steinerberger, Stefan}, journal = {Physics Letters, Section A}, number = {6}, pages = {535 -- 541}, publisher = {Elsevier}, title = {{On the distribution of local extrema in quantum chaos}}, doi = {10.1016/j.physleta.2014.12.010}, volume = {379}, year = {2015}, } @article{1940, abstract = {We typically think of cells as responding to external signals independently by regulating their gene expression levels, yet they often locally exchange information and coordinate. Can such spatial coupling be of benefit for conveying signals subject to gene regulatory noise? Here we extend our information-theoretic framework for gene regulation to spatially extended systems. As an example, we consider a lattice of nuclei responding to a concentration field of a transcriptional regulator (the "input") by expressing a single diffusible target gene. When input concentrations are low, diffusive coupling markedly improves information transmission; optimal gene activation functions also systematically change. A qualitatively new regulatory strategy emerges where individual cells respond to the input in a nearly step-like fashion that is subsequently averaged out by strong diffusion. While motivated by early patterning events in the Drosophila embryo, our framework is generically applicable to spatially coupled stochastic gene expression models.}, author = {Sokolowski, Thomas R and Tkacik, Gasper}, journal = {Physical Review E Statistical Nonlinear and Soft Matter Physics}, number = {6}, publisher = {American Institute of Physics}, title = {{Optimizing information flow in small genetic networks. IV. Spatial coupling}}, doi = {10.1103/PhysRevE.91.062710}, volume = {91}, year = {2015}, } @article{1944, author = {Rakusová, Hana and Fendrych, Matyas and Friml, Jirí}, journal = {Current Opinion in Plant Biology}, number = {2}, pages = {116 -- 123}, publisher = {Elsevier}, title = {{Intracellular trafficking and PIN-mediated cell polarity during tropic responses in plants}}, doi = {10.1016/j.pbi.2014.12.002}, volume = {23}, year = {2015}, } @inproceedings{1481, abstract = {Simple board games, like Tic-Tac-Toe and CONNECT-4, play an important role not only in the development of mathematical and logical skills, but also in the emotional and social development. In this paper, we address the problem of generating targeted starting positions for such games. This can facilitate new approaches for bringing novice players to mastery, and also leads to discovery of interesting game variants. We present an approach that generates starting states of varying hardness levels for player 1 in a two-player board game, given rules of the board game, the desired number of steps required for player 1 to win, and the expertise levels of the two players. Our approach leverages symbolic methods and iterative simulation to efficiently search the extremely large state space. We present experimental results that include discovery of states of varying hardness levels for several simple grid-based board games. The presence of such states for standard game variants like 4×4 Tic-Tac-Toe opens up new games to be played that have never been played as the default start state is heavily biased. }, author = {Ahmed, Umair and Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Gulwani, Sumit}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence}, location = {Austin, TX, USA}, pages = {745 -- 752}, publisher = {AAAI Press}, title = {{Automatic generation of alternative starting positions for simple traditional board games}}, volume = {2}, year = {2015}, } @inproceedings{1483, abstract = {Topological data analysis offers a rich source of valuable information to study vision problems. Yet, so far we lack a theoretically sound connection to popular kernel-based learning techniques, such as kernel SVMs or kernel PCA. In this work, we establish such a connection by designing a multi-scale kernel for persistence diagrams, a stable summary representation of topological features in data. We show that this kernel is positive definite and prove its stability with respect to the 1-Wasserstein distance. Experiments on two benchmark datasets for 3D shape classification/retrieval and texture recognition show considerable performance gains of the proposed method compared to an alternative approach that is based on the recently introduced persistence landscapes.}, author = {Reininghaus, Jan and Huber, Stefan and Bauer, Ulrich and Kwitt, Roland}, location = {Boston, MA, USA}, pages = {4741 -- 4748}, publisher = {IEEE}, title = {{A stable multi-scale kernel for topological machine learning}}, doi = {10.1109/CVPR.2015.7299106}, year = {2015}, } @inproceedings{1495, abstract = {Motivated by biological questions, we study configurations of equal-sized disks in the Euclidean plane that neither pack nor cover. Measuring the quality by the probability that a random point lies in exactly one disk, we show that the regular hexagonal grid gives the maximum among lattice configurations. }, author = {Edelsbrunner, Herbert and Iglesias Ham, Mabel and Kurlin, Vitaliy}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 27th Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry}, location = {Ontario, Canada}, pages = {128--135}, publisher = {Queen's University}, title = {{Relaxed disk packing}}, volume = {2015-August}, year = {2015}, } @article{1497, abstract = {Detecting allelic biases from high-throughput sequencing data requires an approach that maximises sensitivity while minimizing false positives. Here, we present Allelome.PRO, an automated user-friendly bioinformatics pipeline, which uses high-throughput sequencing data from reciprocal crosses of two genetically distinct mouse strains to detect allele-specific expression and chromatin modifications. Allelome.PRO extends approaches used in previous studies that exclusively analyzed imprinted expression to give a complete picture of the ‘allelome’ by automatically categorising the allelic expression of all genes in a given cell type into imprinted, strain-biased, biallelic or non-informative. Allelome.PRO offers increased sensitivity to analyze lowly expressed transcripts, together with a robust false discovery rate empirically calculated from variation in the sequencing data. We used RNA-seq data from mouse embryonic fibroblasts from F1 reciprocal crosses to determine a biologically relevant allelic ratio cutoff, and define for the first time an entire allelome. Furthermore, we show that Allelome.PRO detects differential enrichment of H3K4me3 over promoters from ChIP-seq data validating the RNA-seq results. This approach can be easily extended to analyze histone marks of active enhancers, or transcription factor binding sites and therefore provides a powerful tool to identify candidate cis regulatory elements genome wide.}, author = {Andergassen, Daniel and Dotter, Christoph and Kulinski, Tomasz and Guenzl, Philipp and Bammer, Philipp and Barlow, Denise and Pauler, Florian and Hudson, Quanah}, journal = {Nucleic Acids Research}, number = {21}, publisher = {Oxford University Press}, title = {{Allelome.PRO, a pipeline to define allele-specific genomic features from high-throughput sequencing data}}, doi = {10.1093/nar/gkv727}, volume = {43}, year = {2015}, } @inproceedings{1498, abstract = {Fault-tolerant distributed algorithms play an important role in many critical/high-availability applications. These algorithms are notoriously difficult to implement correctly, due to asynchronous communication and the occurrence of faults, such as the network dropping messages or computers crashing. Nonetheless there is surprisingly little language and verification support to build distributed systems based on fault-tolerant algorithms. In this paper, we present some of the challenges that a designer has to overcome to implement a fault-tolerant distributed system. Then we review different models that have been proposed to reason about distributed algorithms and sketch how such a model can form the basis for a domain-specific programming language. Adopting a high-level programming model can simplify the programmer's life and make the code amenable to automated verification, while still compiling to efficiently executable code. We conclude by summarizing the current status of an ongoing language design and implementation project that is based on this idea.}, author = {Dragoi, Cezara and Henzinger, Thomas A and Zufferey, Damien}, isbn = {978-3-939897-80-4 }, location = {Asilomar, CA, United States}, pages = {90 -- 102}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik}, title = {{The need for language support for fault-tolerant distributed systems}}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.SNAPL.2015.90}, volume = {32}, year = {2015}, } @inproceedings{1499, abstract = {We consider weighted automata with both positive and negative integer weights on edges and study the problem of synchronization using adaptive strategies that may only observe whether the current weight-level is negative or nonnegative. We show that the synchronization problem is decidable in polynomial time for deterministic weighted automata.}, author = {Kretinsky, Jan and Larsen, Kim and Laursen, Simon and Srba, Jiří}, location = {Madrid, Spain}, pages = {142 -- 154}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik}, title = {{Polynomial time decidability of weighted synchronization under partial observability}}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2015.142}, volume = {42}, year = {2015}, } @article{1505, abstract = {This paper is aimed at deriving the universality of the largest eigenvalue of a class of high-dimensional real or complex sample covariance matrices of the form W N =Σ 1/2XX∗Σ 1/2 . Here, X = (xij )M,N is an M× N random matrix with independent entries xij , 1 ≤ i M,≤ 1 ≤ j ≤ N such that Exij = 0, E|xij |2 = 1/N . On dimensionality, we assume that M = M(N) and N/M → d ε (0, ∞) as N ∞→. For a class of general deterministic positive-definite M × M matrices Σ , under some additional assumptions on the distribution of xij 's, we show that the limiting behavior of the largest eigenvalue of W N is universal, via pursuing a Green function comparison strategy raised in [Probab. Theory Related Fields 154 (2012) 341-407, Adv. Math. 229 (2012) 1435-1515] by Erd″os, Yau and Yin for Wigner matrices and extended by Pillai and Yin [Ann. Appl. Probab. 24 (2014) 935-1001] to sample covariance matrices in the null case (&Epsi = I ). Consequently, in the standard complex case (Ex2 ij = 0), combing this universality property and the results known for Gaussian matrices obtained by El Karoui in [Ann. Probab. 35 (2007) 663-714] (nonsingular case) and Onatski in [Ann. Appl. Probab. 18 (2008) 470-490] (singular case), we show that after an appropriate normalization the largest eigenvalue of W N converges weakly to the type 2 Tracy-Widom distribution TW2 . Moreover, in the real case, we show that whenΣ is spiked with a fixed number of subcritical spikes, the type 1 Tracy-Widom limit TW1 holds for the normalized largest eigenvalue of W N , which extends a result of Féral and Péché in [J. Math. Phys. 50 (2009) 073302] to the scenario of nondiagonal Σ and more generally distributed X . In summary, we establish the Tracy-Widom type universality for the largest eigenvalue of generally distributed sample covariance matrices under quite light assumptions on &Sigma . Applications of these limiting results to statistical signal detection and structure recognition of separable covariance matrices are also discussed.}, author = {Bao, Zhigang and Pan, Guangming and Zhou, Wang}, journal = {Annals of Statistics}, number = {1}, pages = {382 -- 421}, publisher = {Institute of Mathematical Statistics}, title = {{Universality for the largest eigenvalue of sample covariance matrices with general population}}, doi = {10.1214/14-AOS1281}, volume = {43}, year = {2015}, } @article{1506, abstract = {Consider the square random matrix An = (aij)n,n, where {aij:= a(n)ij , i, j = 1, . . . , n} is a collection of independent real random variables with means zero and variances one. Under the additional moment condition supn max1≤i,j ≤n Ea4ij <∞, we prove Girko's logarithmic law of det An in the sense that as n→∞ log | detAn| ? (1/2) log(n-1)! d/→√(1/2) log n N(0, 1).}, author = {Bao, Zhigang and Pan, Guangming and Zhou, Wang}, journal = {Bernoulli}, number = {3}, pages = {1600 -- 1628}, publisher = {Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability}, title = {{The logarithmic law of random determinant}}, doi = {10.3150/14-BEJ615}, volume = {21}, year = {2015}, } @article{1508, abstract = {We consider generalized Wigner ensembles and general β-ensembles with analytic potentials for any β ≥ 1. The recent universality results in particular assert that the local averages of consecutive eigenvalue gaps in the bulk of the spectrum are universal in the sense that they coincide with those of the corresponding Gaussian β-ensembles. In this article, we show that local averaging is not necessary for this result, i.e. we prove that the single gap distributions in the bulk are universal. In fact, with an additional step, our result can be extended to any C4(ℝ) potential.}, author = {Erdös, László and Yau, Horng}, journal = {Journal of the European Mathematical Society}, number = {8}, pages = {1927 -- 2036}, publisher = {European Mathematical Society}, title = {{Gap universality of generalized Wigner and β ensembles}}, doi = {10.4171/JEMS/548}, volume = {17}, year = {2015}, }