A simple iterative algorithm for maxcut

We propose a simple iterative (SI) algorithm for the maxcut problem through fully using an equivalent continuous formulation. It does not need rounding at all and has advantages that all subproblems have explicit analytic solutions, the cut values are monotonically updated and the iteration points converge to a local optima in finite steps via an appropriate subgradient selection. Numerical experiments on G-set demonstrate the performance. In particular, the ratios between the best cut values achieved by SI and the best known ones are at least $0.986$ and can be further improved to at least $0.997$ by a preliminary attempt to break out of local optima.Comment: 30 pages, 1 figure. Subgradient selection, cost analysis and local breakout are adde

Mobile English learning: an empirical study on an APP, English fun dubbing

The availability of smart phones connected to mobile network and the occurrence of APPs developed for the educational purposes provide us with the possibility and feasibility of mobile teaching and learning. English Fun Dubbing, an APP designed for its users to practice oral English, was employed in this one-academic-year empirical study to evaluate the benefits of mobile APPs in the field of pedagogy. When the study ended, an anonymous online questionnaire was distributed to the 123 participants to survey the effects of English Fun Dubbing on their English language learning. The results showed that the majority of the respondents were satisfied with it in many aspects including its conveniences, flexibility, user-friendliness, rich materials, authentic language context, etc. and also its functions to inspire learning interests, foster learner autonomy, help realize personalized learning, and so on. We concluded that a reasonable and wise choice of APPs would not only be useful for students' English learning, but also help lead them to use mobile phones in a positive way

A Reference Grammar of Ersu, a Tibeto-Burman Language of China

Ersu is an undocumented Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the southwest of China. It is a head-marking, verb-final, tonal and agglutinative language with an isolating tendency. It has a complex phonological system. Reduplication, compounding, affixation and cliticization are attested in word formation. The canonical constituent order of a simple clause is AOV/SV. However, the syntactic constituent order may also vary due to pragmatic motivations. "Tail-head" linkage strategy is frequently used in discourse. Ellipses occur quite often in speaking and a speech act participant is seldom mentioned. "Topic-comment" constructions occur with high frequency. The grammar consists of 14 chapters that covers almost all the respects of the language such as phonology, word classes, nouns and nominal morphology, noun phrases, numeral systems, nominal and verbal action classification systems, verbs and verb phrases, aspect system, mood and modality, the expression of knowledge, clause types and clause combining, discourse analysis and discourse organization, language change and language endangerment. The production of this book is based on the author's PhD thesis, which was commented as a model grammar for a Tibeto-Burman language by one of the examiners. The book fills an important lacuna in the descriptive literature of linguistic typology

A Differential Geometric View and Explainability of GNN on Evolving Graphs

Graphs are ubiquitous in social networks and biochemistry, where Graph Neural Networks (GNN) are the state-of-the-art models for prediction. Graphs can be evolving and it is vital to formally model and understand how a trained GNN responds to graph evolution. We propose a smooth parameterization of the GNN predicted distributions using axiomatic attribution, where the distributions are on a low-dimensional manifold within a high-dimensional embedding space. We exploit the differential geometric viewpoint to model distributional evolution as smooth curves on the manifold. We reparameterize families of curves on the manifold and design a convex optimization problem to find a unique curve that concisely approximates the distributional evolution for human interpretation. Extensive experiments on node classification, link prediction, and graph classification tasks with evolving graphs demonstrate the better sparsity, faithfulness, and intuitiveness of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art methods.Comment: Accepted into ICLR 202

Strategic behavior in markets and teams : essays in experimental economics

In classical economics the baseline assumption when analyzing the strategic behavior and performance of firms and individuals is that decision-makers are completely rational and selfish (focused on maximizing their own payoff). While this assumption is a useful theoretical benchmark, it do not always apply to peoples behavior in reality. Human beings are often only partially rational, which may lead to unsophisticated and inefficient decisions. In the three self-contained chapters of this dissertation, I analyze strategic decisionmaking and the dynamics of markets and teams using laboratory experiments. Chapter 2, which is based on joint work with Stefan Penczynski, investigates how much information sellers are willing to disclose under competition and whether consumers make sophisticated buying decisions in the sense that they can draw the right conclusions from the information that is and is not provided to them. Chapter 3, which is based on joint work with Henrik Orzen, considers only the firm side and analyzes the assumption that due to competition and market dynamics only rational firms that decide optimally in terms of profit maximization survive in the long-run. Chapter 3 tackles the question of the validity of laboratory experiments in our market setting. In Chapter 4 I examine dynamic investment behavior in a teamwork setting where investments have to be accumulated over time to complete a certain project. I seek to analyze whether there is cooperative behavior even if collective interests conflict with individual interests as costs are private and benefits are public

Response Dynamics of Alkali Metal-Noble Gas Hybrid Trispin System

With numerical calculation of coupled Bloch equations, we have simulated the spin dynamics of nuclear magnetic resonance gyroscope based on alkali metal-noble gas hybrid trispin system. From the perspective of damping harmonic oscillator, a thorough analysis of the response dynamics is demonstrated. The simulation results shows a linear increasing response of gyroscope signal while the noblge gas nuclear spin magnetization and alkali atomic spin lifetime parameters are at the over damping condition. An upper limit of response is imposed on the NMR gyroscope signal due to the inherent dynamics of the hybrid trispin system. The results agrees with present available experimental results and provide useful guidings for future experiments.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

PseudoFuN: Deriving functional potentials of pseudogenes from integrative relationships with genes and microRNAs across 32 cancers

BACKGROUND: Long thought "relics" of evolution, not until recently have pseudogenes been of medical interest regarding regulation in cancer. Often, these regulatory roles are a direct by-product of their close sequence homology to protein-coding genes. Novel pseudogene-gene (PGG) functional associations can be identified through the integration of biomedical data, such as sequence homology, functional pathways, gene expression, pseudogene expression, and microRNA expression. However, not all of the information has been integrated, and almost all previous pseudogene studies relied on 1:1 pseudogene-parent gene relationships without leveraging other homologous genes/pseudogenes. RESULTS: We produce PGG families that expand beyond the current 1:1 paradigm. First, we construct expansive PGG databases by (i) CUDAlign graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerated local alignment of all pseudogenes to gene families (totaling 1.6 billion individual local alignments and >40,000 GPU hours) and (ii) BLAST-based assignment of pseudogenes to gene families. Second, we create an open-source web application (PseudoFuN [Pseudogene Functional Networks]) to search for integrative functional relationships of sequence homology, microRNA expression, gene expression, pseudogene expression, and gene ontology. We produce four "flavors" of CUDAlign-based databases (>462,000,000 PGG pairwise alignments and 133,770 PGG families) that can be queried and downloaded using PseudoFuN. These databases are consistent with previous 1:1 PGG annotation and also are much more powerful including millions of de novo PGG associations. For example, we find multiple known (e.g., miR-20a-PTEN-PTENP1) and novel (e.g., miR-375-SOX15-PPP4R1L) microRNA-gene-pseudogene associations in prostate cancer. PseudoFuN provides a "one stop shop" for identifying and visualizing thousands of potential regulatory relationships related to pseudogenes in The Cancer Genome Atlas cancers. CONCLUSIONS: Thousands of new PGG associations can be explored in the context of microRNA-gene-pseudogene co-expression and differential expression with a simple-to-use online tool by bioinformaticians and oncologists alike