Riemann and Melodic Analysis: Studies in Folk-Musical Tonality

This article discusses Riemann's Folkloristische Tonalitätsstudien or “Studies in Folk-Musical Tonality”. While his study at a glance seemed to contradict his earlier beliefs on tonality as a natural and universal system, his study however, sought to reinforce the natural basis of the tonal system by looking and examining non-European repertoires. Riemann's Folkloristische Tonalitätsstudien is unique among his studies in that it is his only treatise that does not start out from the assumption of tonal triadic harmonies; instead, it approaches musical structures from a strictly melodic angle. In this article, the focus is on Riemann's melodic analysis and evolutionary history of scalar models. It focuses on his analysis of pentatonicism and tetrachords. In his Folkloristische Tonalitätsstudien, Riemann is generally careful not to commit to a chronology, but supplies instead heuristic links between structural stages. While his explanation of tetrachords as three-note fragments of pentatonic scales with infixed pien is historically doubtful, his study nevertheless allowed him to examine all scalar systems as combinations of these two principles. Thus, his study on folk music has been pressed into service to represent a middle ground between strict pentatonicism and modern diatonism.Musi

Additive twists of Fourier coefficients of symmetric-square lifts

We study the sum of additively twisted Fourier coefficients of a symmetric-square lift of a Maass form invariant under the full modular group. Our bounds are uniform in terms of the spectral parameter of the Maass form, as well as in terms of the additive twist.Comment: 13 pages. v2: fixed the relation between T and t_j on p.2 and added clarification to some reference

A General Framework for Constrained Bayesian Optimization using Information-based Search

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from MIT Press via https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2946645.3053442.We present an information-theoretic framework for solving global black-box optimization problems that also have black-box constraints. Of particular interest to us is to efficiently solve problems with decoupled constraints, in which subsets of the objective and constraint functions may be evaluated independently. For example, when the objective is evaluated on a CPU and the constraints are evaluated independently on a GPU. These problems require an acquisition function that can be separated into the contributions of the individual function evaluations. We develop one such acquisition function and call it Predictive Entropy Search with Constraints (PESC). PESC is an approximation to the expected information gain criterion and it compares favorably to alternative approaches based on improvement in several synthetic and real-world problems. In addition to this, we consider problems with a mix of functions that are fast and slow to evaluate. These problems require balancing the amount of time spent in the meta-computation of PESC and in the actual evaluation of the target objective. We take a bounded rationality approach and develop a partial update for PESC which trades off accuracy against speed. We then propose a method for adaptively switching between the partial and full updates for PESC. This allows us to interpolate between versions of PESC that are efficient in terms of function evaluations and those that are efficient in terms of wall-clock time. Overall, we demonstrate that PESC is an effective algorithm that provides a promising direction towards a unified solution for constrained Bayesian optimization.José Miguel Hernández-Lobato acknowledges support from the Rafael del Pino Foundation. Zoubin Ghahramani acknowledges support from Google Focused Research Award and EPSRC grant EP/I036575/1. Matthew W. Hoffman acknowledges support from EPSRC grant EP/J012300/1

The Evolution of the Anopheles 16 Genomes Project

We report the imminent completion of a set of reference genome assemblies for 16 species of Anopheles mosquitoes. In addition to providing a generally useful resource for comparative genomic analyses, these genome sequences will greatly facilitate exploration of the capacity exhibited by some Anopheline mosquito species to serve as vectors for malaria parasites. A community analysis project will commence soon to perform a thorough comparative genomic investigation of these newly sequenced genomes. Completion of this project via the use of short next-generation sequence reads required innovation in both the bioinformatic and laboratory realms, and the resulting knowledge gained could prove useful for genome sequencing projects targeting other unconventional genomes

Alliance of Genome Resources Portal: unified model organism research platform

The Alliance of Genome Resources (Alliance) is a consortium of the major model organism databases and the Gene Ontology that is guided by the vision of facilitating exploration of related genes in human and well-studied model organisms by providing a highly integrated and comprehensive platform that enables researchers to leverage the extensive body of genetic and genomic studies in these organisms. Initiated in 2016, the Alliance is building a central portal (www.alliancegenome.org) for access to data for the primary model organisms along with gene ontology data and human data. All data types represented in the Alliance portal (e.g. genomic data and phenotype descriptions) have common data models and workflows for curation. All data are open and freely available via a variety of mechanisms. Long-term plans for the Alliance project include a focus on coverage of additional model organisms including those without dedicated curation communities, and the inclusion of new data types with a particular focus on providing data and tools for the non-model-organism researcher that support enhanced discovery about human health and disease. Here we review current progress and present immediate plans for this new bioinformatics resource

Alliance of Genome Resources Portal: unified model organism research platform

The Alliance of Genome Resources (Alliance) is a consortium of the major model organism databases and the Gene Ontology that is guided by the vision of facilitating exploration of related genes in human and well-studied model organisms by providing a highly integrated and comprehensive platform that enables researchers to leverage the extensive body of genetic and genomic studies in these organisms. Initiated in 2016, the Alliance is building a central portal (www.alliancegenome.org) for access to data for the primary model organisms along with gene ontology data and human data. All data types represented in the Alliance portal (e.g. genomic data and phenotype descriptions) have common data models and workflows for curation. All data are open and freely available via a variety of mechanisms. Long-term plans for the Alliance project include a focus on coverage of additional model organisms including those without dedicated curation communities, and the inclusion of new data types with a particular focus on providing data and tools for the non-model-organism researcher that support enhanced discovery about human health and disease. Here we review current progress and present immediate plans for this new bioinformatics resource