In this study, we present the application of a novel capillary electrophoresis (CE) method in combination with label-free quantitation and support vector machine-based feature selection (support vector machine-estimated recursive feature elimination or SVM-RFE) to identify potential glycan alterations in Parkinson’s disease. Specific focus was placed on the use of neutral coated capillaries, by a dynamic capillary coating strategy, to ensure stable and repeatable separations without the need of non-mass spectrometry (MS) friendly additives within the separation electrolyte. The developed online dynamic coating strategy was applied to identify serum N-glycosylation by CE-MS/MS in combination with exoglycosidase sequencing. The annotated structures were quantified in 15 controls and 15 Parkinson’s disease patients by label-free quantitation. Lower sialylation and increased fucosylation were found in Parkinson’s disease patients on tri-antennary glycans with 2 and 3 terminal sialic acids. The set of potential glycan alterations was narrowed by a recursive feature elimination algorithm resulting in the efficient classification of male patients.

Recently, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been offering a new online approach in the field of distance learning and online education. A typical MOOC course consists of video lectures, reading material and easily accessible tests for students. For a computer programming course, it is important to provide interactive, dynamic, online coding exercises and more complex programming assignments for learners. It is expedient for the students to receive prompt feedback on their coding submissions. Although MOOC automated programme evaluation subsystem is capable of assessing source programme files that are in learning management systems, in MOOC systems there is a grader that is responsible for evaluating students' assignments with the result that course staff would be required to assess thousands of programmes submitted by the participants of the course without the benefit of an automatic grader. This paper presents a new concept for grading programming submissions of students and improved techniques based on the Java unit testing framework that enables automatic grading of code chunks. Some examples are also given such as the creation of unique exercises by dynamically generating the parameters of the assignment in a MOOC programming course combined with the kind of coding style recognition to teach coding standards.

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There are many state-of-the-art algorithms presented in the literature that perform very well on some evaluation data but are not studied with the data properties on which they are applied; therefore, they could have low performance on data with other characteristics. In this paper, the results of comprehensive research regarding the prediction with the frequently applied AdaBoost algorithm on real-world sensor data are presented. The chosen dataset has some specific characteristics, and it contains error and failure data of several machines and their components. The research aims to investigate whether the AdaBoost algorithm has the capability of predicting failures, thus providing the necessary information for monitoring and condition-based maintenance (CBM). The dataset is analyzed, and the principal characteristics are presented. Performance evaluations of the AdaBoost algorithm that we present show a prediction capability below expectations for this algorithm. The specificity of this study is that it indicates the limitation of the AdaBoost algorithm, which could perform very well on some data, but not so well on others. Based on this research and some others that we performed, and actual research from worldwide studies, we must outline that the mathematical analysis of the data is especially important to develop or adapt algorithms to be very efficient.

This paper deals with the flow shop scheduling problem. To find the optimal solution is an NP-hard problem. The paper reviews some algorithms from the literature and applies a benchmark dataset to evaluate their efficiency. In this research work, the discrete bacterial memetic evolutionary algorithm (DBMEA) as a global searcher was investigated. The proposed algorithm improves the local search by applying the simulated annealing algorithm (SA). This paper presents the experimental results of solving the no-idle flow shop scheduling problem. To compare the proposed algorithm with other researchers’ work, a benchmark problem set was used. The calculated makespan times were compared against the best-known solutions in the literature. The proposed hybrid algorithm has provided better results than methods using genetic algorithm variants, thus it is a major improvement for the memetic algorithm family solving production scheduling problems.