A self‐applicable online partial evaluator for recursive flowchart languages

This paper describes a self‐applicable online partial evaluator for a flowchart language with recursive calls. Self‐application of the partial evaluator yields generating extensions that are as efficient as those reported in the literature for offline partial evaluation. This result is remarkable because it has been assumed that online partial evaluation techniques unavoidably lead to inefficient and overgeneralized generating extensions. The purpose of this paper is not to determine which kind of partial evaluation is better, but to show how the problem can be solved by recursive polyvariant specialization. The design of the self‐applicable online partial evaluator is based on a number of known techniques, but by combining them in a new way this result can be produced. The partial evaluator, its techniques, and its implementation are presented in full. Self‐application according to all three Futamura projections is demonstrated. The complete bootstrap of a compiler generator from a partial evaluator is also reported. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How scientific research reacts to international public health emergencies: a global analysis of response patterns

As of the middle of April 2020, the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has claimed more than 137,000 lives (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html). Because of its extremely fast spreading, the attention of the global scientific community is now focusing on slowing down, containing and finally stopping the spread of this disease. This requires the concerted action of researchers and practitioners of many related fields, raising, as always in such situations the question, of what kind of research has to be conducted, what are the priorities, how has research to be coordinated and who needs to be involved. In other words, what are the characteristics of the response of the global research community on the challenge? In the present paper, we attempt to characterise, quantify and measure the response of academia to international public health emergencies in a comparative bibliometric study of multiple outbreaks. In addition, we provide a preliminary review of the global research effort regarding the defeat of the COVID-19 pandemic. From our analysis of six infectious disease outbreaks since 2000, including COVID-19, we find that academia always responded quickly to public health emergencies with a sharp increase in the number of publications immediately following the declaration of an outbreak by the WHO. In general, countries/regions place emphasis on epidemics in their own region, but Europe and North America are also concerned with outbreaks in other, developed and less developed areas through conducting intensive collaborative research with the core countries/regions of the outbreak, such as in the case of Ebola in Africa. Researches in the fields of virology, infectious diseases and immunology are the most active, and we identified two characteristic patterns in global science distinguishing research in Europe and America that is more focused on public health from that conducted in China and Japan with more emphasis on biomedical research and clinical pharmacy, respectively. Universities contribute slightly less than half to the global research output, and the vast majority of research funding originates from the public sector. Our findings on how academia responds to emergencies could be beneficial to decision-makers in research and health policy in creating and adjusting anti-epidemic/-pandemic strategies.

     

Blended Learning – ein innovatives Weiterbildungskonzept für die Technische Chemie

The ever‐increasing and ever‐changing challenges of the job market require professionals to constantly attend extra occupational education programs. Professionals furthermore express their desire for a compatibility of family and work. Therefore, a general concept for extended vocational training in the field of natural science and technology was developed based on blended learning. As an example, the concept was implemented and tested on the basis of the extended vocational training course “tc‐compact^BL” in Chemical Technology.     

Reverse phase contrast: an experimental demonstration

We present experimental results showing that the reverse phase contrast (RPC) technique is a viable method for the generation of a binary phase distribution from a spatially varying amplitude pattern using Fourier plane filtering techniques. Experimental results are shown for the generation of a binary 0-pi phase only distribution using either an amplitude mask or a spatial light modulator to provide the input and the results are shown to be in agreement with theoretical predictions for the RPC technique.     

Program transformation system based on generalized partial computation

Generalized Partial Computation (GPC) is a program transformation method utilizing partial information about input data, abstract data types of auxiliary functions and the logical structure of a source program. GPC uses both an inference engine such as a theorem prover and a classical partial evaluator to optimize programs. Therefore, GPC is more powerful than classical partial evaluators but harder to implement and control. We have implemented an experimental GPC system called WSDFU (Waseda Simplify-Distribute-Fold-Unfold). This paper demonstrates the power of the program transformation system as well as its theorem prover and discusses some future works. Yoshihiko Futamura, Ph.D.: He is Professor of Department of Information and Computer Science and the director of the Institute for Software Production Technology (ISPT) of Waseda University. He received his BS in mathematics from Hokkaido University in 1965, MS in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1972 and Ph.D. degree from Hokkaido University in 1985. He joined Hitachi Central Research Laboratory in 1965 and moved to Waseda University in 1991. He was a visiting professor of Uppsala University from 1985 to 1986 and a visiting scholar of Harvard University from 1988 to 1989. Automatic generation of computer programs and programming methodology are his main research fields. He is the inventor of the Futamura Projections in partial evaluation and ISO8631 PAD (Problem Analysis Diagram). Zenjiro Konishi: He is a visiting lecturer of Institute for Software Production Technology, Waseda University. He received his M. Sc. degree in mathematics from Waseda University in 1995. His research interests include automated theorem proving. He received JSSST Takahashi Award in 2001. He is a member of JSSST and IPSJ. Robert Glück, Ph.D., Habil.: He is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen. He received his Ph.D. and Habilitation (venia docendi) from the Vienna University of Technology in 1991 and 1997. He was research assistant at the City University of New York and received twice the Erwin-Schrodinger-Fellowship of the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF). After being an Invited Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), he is now funded by the PRESTO21 program for basic research of the Japan Science and Technology Corporation (JST) and located at Waseda University in Tokyo. His main research interests are advanced programming languages, theory and practice of program transformation, and metaprogramming.     

Exploration of mixed-valence chemistry: inventing new analogues of the Creutz-Taube ion

Starting from the Creutz-Taube ion as the prototype of a molecule-bridged mixed-valent complex, a number of related systems are presented in which the metal, the co-ligands, the molecular bridge, the d electron configuration, the medium, the charge, the coordination mode, or the nuclearity have been modified. The new mixed-valent configurations, as obtained through various chemical approaches, display different stabilities and spectroscopic characteristics in relation to the Creutz-Taube ion; the analysis of these results serves to provide a better understanding of fundamental aspects of molecule-mediated metal-metal interaction.     

Significance of Z-value statistics of Smith-Waterman scores for protein alignments

The Z-value is an attempt to estimate the statistical significance of a Smith-Waterman dynamic alignment score (SW-score) through the use of a Monte-Carlo process. It partly reduces the bias induced by the composition and length of the sequences. This paper is not a theoretical study on the distribution of SW-scores and Z-values. Rather, it presents a statistical analysis of Z-values on large datasets of protein sequences, leading to a law of probability that the experimental Z-values follow. First, we determine the relationships between the computed Z-value, an estimation of its variance and the number of randomizations in the Monte-Carlo process. Then, we illustrate that Z-values are less correlated to sequence lengths than SW-scores. Then we show that pairwise alignments, performed on 'quasi-real' sequences (i.e., randomly shuffled sequences of the same length and amino acid composition as the real ones) lead to Z-value distributions that statistically fit the extreme value distribution, more precisely the Gumbel distribution (global EVD, Extreme Value Distribution). However, for real protein sequences, we observe an over-representation of high Z-values. We determine first a cutoff value which separates these overestimated Z-values from those which follow the global EVD. We then show that the interesting part of the tail of distribution of Z-values can be approximated by another EVD (i.e., an EVD which differs from the global EVD) or by a Pareto law. This has been confirmed for all proteins analysed so far, whether extracted from individual genomes, or from the ensemble of five complete microbial genomes comprising altogether 16956 protein sequences.     

Phase-only optical decryption of a fixed mask

We present a system for the implementation of phase-only optical decryption of an encrypted fixed phase mask. We achieve decryption by superimposing a decrypting phase key, implemented on a phase-only spatial light modulator with an encrypted phase mask in two equivalent image planes in an optical system. The decrypted phase information is retrieved by the generalized phase-contrast technique. We have constructed a compact experimental system that uses a 635-nm diode laser in which a fixed encrypted 0/pi binary phase mask is decrypted by a binary phase key produced electronically on the spatial light modulator. The key is aligned by electronic scrolling of its position with respect to the mask.