Arabidopsis thaliana, a small annual plant belonging to the mustard family, is the subject of study by an estimated 7000 researchers around the world. In addition to the large body of genetic, physiological and biochemical data gathered for this plant, it will be the first higher plant genome to be completely sequenced, with completion expected at the end of the year 2000. The sequencing effort has been coordinated by an international collaboration, the Arabidopsis Genome Initiative (AGI). The rationale for intensive investigation of Arabidopsis is that it is an excellent model for higher plants. In order to maximize use of the knowledge gained about this plant, there is a need for a comprehensive database and information retrieval and analysis system that will provide user-friendly access to Arabidopsis information. This paper describes the initial steps we have taken toward realizing these goals in a project called The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) (www.arabidopsis.org).

Abstract. This paper develops and analyzes a generalization of the Broyden class of quasiNewton methods to the problem of minimizing a smooth objective function f on a Riemannian manifold. A condition on vector transport and retraction that guarantees convergence and facilitates efficient computation is derived. Experimental evidence is presented demonstrating the value of the extension to the Riemannian Broyden class through superior performance for some problems compared to existing Riemannian BFGS methods, in particular those that depend on differentiated retraction.

Abstract. The choice of the variable to flip in the Walksat family procedures is always random in that it is selected from a randomly chosen unsatisfied clause c. This choice in Novelty or R-Novelty heuristics also contains some determinism in that the variable to flip is always limited to the two best variables in c. In this paper, we first propose a diversification parameter for Novelty (or R-Novelty) heuristic to break the determinism in Novelty and show its performance compared with the random walk parameter in Novelty+. Then we exploit promising decreasing paths in a deterministic fashion in local search using a gradient-based approach. In other words, when promising decreasing paths exist, the variable to flip is no longer selected from a randomly chosen unsatisfied clause but in a deterministic fashion to surely decrease the number of unsatisfied clauses. Experimental results show that the proposed diversification and the determinism allow to significantly improve Novelty (and Walksat).

SLE significantly increased the risks of surgical patients for overall major complications and mortality after major surgery. Our findings demonstrated the need for integrated care and revised protocols for perioperative management to improve outcomes for surgical patients with SLE.

We propose two new heuristics to pack unequal circles into a two dimensional circular container. The first one, denoted by A1.0, is a basic heurisitc which selects the next circle to place according to the maximal hole degree rule. The second one, denoted by A1.5, uses a self lookahead strategy to improve A1.0. We evaluate A1.0 and A1.5 on a series of instances up to 100 circles from the literature and compare them with existing approaches. We also study the behaviour of our approach for packing equal circles comparing with a specified approach in the literature. Experimental results show that our approach has a good performance in terms of solution quality and computational time for packing unequal circles.