A Gramaticalização do Verbo Ir e a Variação de Formas para Expressar o Futuro do Presente: uma Fotografia Capixaba

Esta pesquisa verifica o estágio do processo de gramaticalização do verbo IR, que tem assumido a função de auxiliar em construções perifrásticas para expressar tempo. Para isso, investiga-se a variação entre as formas sintética e perifrástica com IR para expressão do futuro do presente. Temos por hipótese que a forma perifrástica já atinge todos os gêneros das duas modalidades da língua, uma vez que já se especializou para codificar tempo. São examinados dois gêneros, tomando-os como prototípicos do continuun oral/escrito: entrevistas com informantes universitários e editoriais de jornal. Partindo de uma orientação teórica Funcionalista, num quadro mais geral, concebe-se a língua como flexível ao uso, passível de influências cognitivas, sociais e também individuais, embora haja nela forças que atuam no sentido de regularizar a estrutura. Seguindo algumas pesquisas que têm se mostrado frutíferas, o modelo funcionalista estará em diálogo com outro modelo que procura dar conta da heterogeneidade estruturada da língua e de seus processos de mudança: a Teoria Variacionista. Num quadro mais específico, os fundamentos que orientam a pesquisa são os da Gramaticalização. Os dados extraídos dos gêneros selecionados serão submetidos ao programa computacional GOLDVARB 2001 e, em seguida, interpretados à luz das teorias lingüísticas que fundamentam esta pesquisa

MICA: A fast short-read aligner that takes full advantage of Many Integrated Core Architecture (MIC)

Background: Short-read aligners have recently gained a lot of speed by exploiting the massive parallelism of GPU. An uprising alterative to GPU is Intel MIC; supercomputers like Tianhe-2, currently top of TOP500, is built with 48,000 MIC boards to offer ~55 PFLOPS. The CPU-like architecture of MIC allows CPU-based software to be parallelized easily; however, the performance is often inferior to GPU counterparts as an MIC card contains only ~60 cores (while a GPU card typically has over a thousand cores). Results: To better utilize MIC-enabled computers for NGS data analysis, we developed a new short-read aligner MICA that is optimized in view of MIC's limitation and the extra parallelism inside each MIC core. By utilizing the 512-bit vector units in the MIC and implementing a new seeding strategy, experiments on aligning 150 bp paired-end reads show that MICA using one MIC card is 4.9 times faster than BWA-MEM (using 6 cores of a top-end CPU), and slightly faster than SOAP3-dp (using a GPU). Furthermore, MICA's simplicity allows very efficient scale-up when multiple MIC cards are used in a node (3 cards give a 14.1-fold speedup over BWA-MEM). Summary: MICA can be readily used by MIC-enabled supercomputers for production purpose. We have tested MICA on Tianhe-2 with 90 WGS samples (17.47 Tera-bases), which can be aligned in an hour using 400 nodes. MICA has impressive performance even though MIC is only in its initial stage of development. Availability and implementation: MICA's source code is freely available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mica-aligner under GPL v3. Supplementary information: Supplementary information is available as "Additional File 1". Datasets are available at www.bio8.cs.hku.hk/dataset/mica.published_or_final_versio

SPCS: Secure and Privacy-Preserving Charging-Station Searching Using VANET

Electric vehicle has attracted more and more attention all around the world in recent years because of its many advantages such as low pollution to the environment. However, due to the limitation of current technology, charging remains an important issue. In this paper, we study the problem of finding and making reservation on charging stations via a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). Our focus is on the privacy concern as drivers would not like to be traced by knowing which charging stations they have visited. Technically, we make use of the property of blind signature to achieve this goal. In brief, an electric vehicle first generates a set of anonymous credentials on its own. A trusted authority then blindly signs on them after verifying the identity of the vehicle. After that, the vehicle can make charging station searching queries and reservations by presenting those signed anonymous credentials. We implemented the scheme and show that the credential signing process (expected to be the most time consuming step) can be completed within reasonable time when the parameters are properly set. In particular, the process can be completed in 5 minutes when 1024 bits of RSA signing key is used. Moreover, we show that our scheme is secure in terms of authentication and privacy-preserving