11 x 11 Domineering is Solved: The first player wins

We have developed a program called MUDoS (Maastricht University Domineering Solver) that solves Domineering positions in a very efficient way. This enables the solution of known positions so far (up to the 10 x 10 board) much quicker (measured in number of investigated nodes). More importantly, it enables the solution of the 11 x 11 Domineering board, a board up till now far out of reach of previous Domineering solvers. The solution needed the investigation of 259,689,994,008 nodes, using almost half a year of computation time on a single simple desktop computer. The results show that under optimal play the first player wins the 11 x 11 Domineering game, irrespective if Vertical or Horizontal starts the game. In addition, several other boards hitherto unsolved were solved. Using the convention that Vertical starts, the 8 x 15, 11 x 9, 12 x 8, 12 x 15, 14 x 8, and 17 x 6 boards are all won by Vertical, whereas the 6 x 17, 8 x 12, 9 x 11, and 11 x 10 boards are all won by Horizontal

A Upf3b-mutant mouse model with behavioral and neurogenesis defects.

Nonsense-mediated RNA decay (NMD) is a highly conserved and selective RNA degradation pathway that acts on RNAs terminating their reading frames in specific contexts. NMD is regulated in a tissue-specific and developmentally controlled manner, raising the possibility that it influences developmental events. Indeed, loss or depletion of NMD factors have been shown to disrupt developmental events in organisms spanning the phylogenetic scale. In humans, mutations in the NMD factor gene, UPF3B, cause intellectual disability (ID) and are strongly associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and schizophrenia (SCZ). Here, we report the generation and characterization of mice harboring a null Upf3b allele. These Upf3b-null mice exhibit deficits in fear-conditioned learning, but not spatial learning. Upf3b-null mice also have a profound defect in prepulse inhibition (PPI), a measure of sensorimotor gating commonly deficient in individuals with SCZ and other brain disorders. Consistent with both their PPI and learning defects, cortical pyramidal neurons from Upf3b-null mice display deficient dendritic spine maturation in vivo. In addition, neural stem cells from Upf3b-null mice have impaired ability to undergo differentiation and require prolonged culture to give rise to functional neurons with electrical activity. RNA sequencing (RNAseq) analysis of the frontal cortex identified UPF3B-regulated RNAs, including direct NMD target transcripts encoding proteins with known functions in neural differentiation, maturation and disease. We suggest Upf3b-null mice serve as a novel model system to decipher cellular and molecular defects underlying ID and neurodevelopmental disorders

Scalable and Interpretable One-class SVMs with Deep Learning and Random Fourier features

One-class support vector machine (OC-SVM) for a long time has been one of the most effective anomaly detection methods and extensively adopted in both research as well as industrial applications. The biggest issue for OC-SVM is yet the capability to operate with large and high-dimensional datasets due to optimization complexity. Those problems might be mitigated via dimensionality reduction techniques such as manifold learning or autoencoder. However, previous work often treats representation learning and anomaly prediction separately. In this paper, we propose autoencoder based one-class support vector machine (AE-1SVM) that brings OC-SVM, with the aid of random Fourier features to approximate the radial basis kernel, into deep learning context by combining it with a representation learning architecture and jointly exploit stochastic gradient descent to obtain end-to-end training. Interestingly, this also opens up the possible use of gradient-based attribution methods to explain the decision making for anomaly detection, which has ever been challenging as a result of the implicit mappings between the input space and the kernel space. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to study the interpretability of deep learning in anomaly detection. We evaluate our method on a wide range of unsupervised anomaly detection tasks in which our end-to-end training architecture achieves a performance significantly better than the previous work using separate training.Comment: Accepted at European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML-PKDD) 201

Spectroscopy of free radicals and radical containing entrance-channel complexes in superfluid helium nano-droplets

The spectroscopy of free radicals and radical containing entrance-channel complexes embedded in superfluid helium nano-droplets is reviewed. The collection of dopants inside individual droplets in the beam represents a micro-canonical ensemble, and as such each droplet may be considered an isolated cryo-reactor. The unique properties of the droplets, namely their low temperature (0.4 K) and fast cooling rates ($\sim10^{16}$ K s$^{-1}$) provides novel opportunities for the formation and high-resolution studies of molecular complexes containing one or more free radicals. The production methods of radicals are discussed in light of their applicability for embedding the radicals in helium droplets. The spectroscopic studies performed to date on molecular radicals and on entrance / exit-channel complexes of radicals with stable molecules are detailed. The observed complexes provide new information on the potential energy surfaces of several fundamental chemical reactions and on the intermolecular interactions present in open-shell systems. Prospects of further experiments of radicals embedded in helium droplets are discussed, especially the possibilities to prepare and study high-energy structures and their controlled manipulation, as well as the possibility of fundamental physics experiments.Comment: 25 pages, 12 figures, 4 tables (RevTeX

Regulation of stanniocalcin-1 secretion by BeWo cells and first trimester human placental tissue from normal pregnancies and those at increased risk of developing preeclampsia.

Stanniocalcin-1 (STC-1) is a multi-functional glycosylated peptide present in the plasma of healthy women postpartum and increased further in pregnancies complicated by preeclampsia. Although the STC-1 gene is expressed by the placenta what regulates its secretion and from which cells at the feto-maternal interface is unknown. Here, we demonstrate for the first time that the syncytiotrophoblast and cytotrophoblast are a major site of STC-1 protein expression in first trimester placental tissue. Further, in response to low oxygen, first trimester chorionic villous tissue from pregnancies at increased risk of developing preeclampsia secreted significantly more STC-1 than normal tissue under the same conditions. Using the human trophoblast cell line BeWo we have shown that low oxygen increased the secretion of STC-1 but it required co-stimulation with the Adenosine-3', 5'-cyclic monophosphate (cAMP) analogue, 8-Bromo adenosine-3', 5'-cyclic monophosphate cAMP (8 Br-cAMP) to reach significance. Inhibition of Hypoxia inducible factor 2α (HIF-2α) and the Phosphatidylinositol-3 kinase (PI3 -Kinase)/AKT/Serum and glucocorticoid-induced kinase-1(SGK-1) pathway resulted in significant inhibition of STC-1 secretion. As both low oxygen and cAMP are known to play a central role in placental function, their regulation of STC-1 points to a potentially important role in the maintenance of a normal healthy pregnancy and we would hypothesize that it may act to protect against prolonged placental hypoxia seen in preeclampsia

SILAC-based proteomic quantification of chemoattractant-induced cytoskeleton dynamics on a second to minute timescale

Cytoskeletal dynamics during cell behaviours ranging from endocytosis and exocytosis to cell division and movement is controlled by a complex network of signalling pathways, the full details of which are as yet unresolved. Here we show that SILAC-based proteomic methods can be used to characterize the rapid chemoattractant-induced dynamic changes in the actin–myosin cytoskeleton and regulatory elements on a proteome-wide scale with a second to minute timescale resolution. This approach provides novel insights in the ensemble kinetics of key cytoskeletal constituents and association of known and novel identified binding proteins. We validate the proteomic data by detailed microscopy-based analysis of in vivo translocation dynamics for key signalling factors. This rapid large-scale proteomic approach may be applied to other situations where highly dynamic changes in complex cellular compartments are expected to play a key role

Local biases drive, but do not determine, the perception of illusory trajectories

When a dot moves horizontally across a set of tilted lines of alternating orientations, the dot appears to be moving up and down along its trajectory. This perceptual phenomenon, known as the slalom illusion, reveals a mismatch between the veridical motion signals and the subjective percept of the motion trajectory, which has not been comprehensively explained. In the present study, we investigated the empirical boundaries of the slalom illusion using psychophysical methods. The phenomenon was found to occur both under conditions of smooth pursuit eye movements and constant fixation, and to be consistently amplified by intermittently occluding the dot trajectory. When the motion direction of the dot was not constant, however, the stimulus display did not elicit the expected illusory percept. These findings confirm that a local bias towards perpendicularity at the intersection points between the dot trajectory and the tilted lines cause the illusion, but also highlight that higher-level cortical processes are involved in interpreting and amplifying the biased local motion signals into a global illusion of trajectory perception

Light Higgsino from Axion Dark Radiation

The recent observations imply that there is an extra relativistic degree of freedom coined dark radiation. We argue that the QCD axion is a plausible candidate for the dark radiation, not only because of its extremely small mass, but also because in the supersymmetric extension of the Peccei-Quinn mechanism the saxion tends to dominate the Universe and decays into axions with a sizable branching fraction. We show that the Higgsino mixing parameter mu is bounded from above when the axions produced at the saxion decays constitute the dark radiation: mu \lesssim 300 GeV for a saxion lighter than 2m_W, and mu less than the saxion mass otherwise. Interestingly, the Higgsino can be light enough to be within the reach of LHC and/or ILC even when the other superparticles are heavy with mass about 1 TeV or higher. We also estimate the abundance of axino produced by the decays of Higgsino and saxion.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figure; published in JHE

Correlators of Vertex Operators for Circular Strings with Winding Numbers in AdS5xS5

We compute semiclassically the two-point correlator of the marginal vertex operators describing the rigid circular spinning string state with one large spin and one windining number in AdS_5 and three large spins and three winding numbers in S^5. The marginality condition and the conformal invariant expression for the two-point correlator obtained by using an appropriate vertex operator are shown to be associated with the diagonal and off-diagonal Virasoro constraints respectively. We evaluate semiclassically the three-point correlator of two heavy circular string vertex operators and one zero-momentum dilaton vertex operator and discuss its relation with the derivative of the dimension of the heavy circular string state with respect to the string tension.Comment: 16 pages, LaTeX, no figure