Over the past quarter-century, microbiologists have used DNA sequence information to aid in the characterization of microbial communities. During the last decade, this has expanded from single genes to microbial community genomics, or metagenomics, in which the gene content of an environment can provide not just a census of the community members but direct information on metabolic capabilities ...

ÐIn the pursuit of instruction-level parallelism, significant demands are placed on a processor's instruction delivery mechanism. Delivering the performance necessary to meet future processor execution targets requires that the performance of the instruction delivery mechanism scale with the execution core. Attaining these targets is a challenging task due to I-cache misses, branch mispredictio...

Indirect branch prediction is likely to become more important in the future because indirect branches tend to be more frequent in object-oriented programs. With indirect branch prediction misprediction rates of around 25% on current processors, such branches can incur a significant fraction of branch misses even though indirect branches are less frequent than the more predictable conditional br...

This paper considers the task of thorax disease classification on chest X-ray images. Existing methods generally use the global image as input for network learning. Such a strategy is limited in two aspects. 1) A thorax disease usually happens in (small) localized areas which are disease specific. Training CNNs using global image may be affected by the (excessive) irrelevant noisy areas. 2) Due...

This paper intends to show that the time needed to solve mixed integer programming problems by branch and bound can be roughly predicted early in the solution process. We construct a procedure that can be implemented as part of an MIP solver. It is based on analyzing the partial tree resulting from running the algorithm for a short period of time, and predicting the shape of the whole tree. The...

We introduce our work on the backdoor key, a concept that shows promise for characterizing problem hardness in backtracking search algorithms. The general notion of backdoors was recently introduced to explain the source of heavy-tailed behaviors in backtracking algorithms (Williams, Gomes, & Selman 2003a; 2003b). We describe empirical studies that show that the key faction,i.e., the ratio of t...

We have evaluated by numerical simulation the average size R(K) of random polygons of fixed knot topology K=,3(1),3(1) musical sharp 4(1), and we have confirmed the scaling law R(2)(K) approximately N(2nu(K)) for the number N of polygonal nodes in a wide range; N=100-2200. The best fit gives 2nu(K) approximately 1.11-1.16 with good fitting curves in the whole range of N. The estimate of 2nu(K) ...

In this paper, the relation between the Glushkov automaton (Apos) and the partial derivative automaton (Apd) of a given regular expression, in terms of transition complexity, is studied. The average transition complexity of Apos was proved by Nicaud to be linear in the size of the corresponding expression. This result was obtained using an upper bound of the number of transitions of Apos. Here ...

This paper explores some structural constraints on computing the mean sizes of sets of elements. Neither number nor density had much effect on judgments of mean size. Intermingled sets of circles segregated only by color gave mean discrimination thresholds for size that were as accurate as sets segregated by location. They were about the same when the relevant color was cued, when it was not cu...

Many industrial processes need information about material grain size. In this work we examined rolled chrome concentrate to determine the average grain size. Test material was sieved into 15 fractions, from 37 μm to 500 μm. The analysis method can be divided in three sections: preprocessing, feature extraction and classification. Mathematical morphology was used as preprocessing method, with gr...