@article{933,
  abstract     = {Although collective cell motion plays an important role, for example during wound healing, embryogenesis, or cancer progression, the fundamental rules governing this motion are still not well understood, in particular at high cell density. We study here the motion of human bronchial epithelial cells within a monolayer, over long times. We observe that, as the monolayer ages, the cells slow down monotonously, while the velocity correlation length first increases as the cells slow down but eventually decreases at the slowest motions. By comparing experiments, analytic model, and detailed particle-based simulations, we shed light on this biological amorphous solidification process, demonstrating that the observed dynamics can be explained as a consequence of the combined maturation and strengthening of cell-cell and cell-substrate adhesions. Surprisingly, the increase of cell surface density due to proliferation is only secondary in this process. This analysis is confirmed with two other cell types. The very general relations between the mean cell velocity and velocity correlation lengths, which apply for aggregates of self-propelled particles, as well as motile cells, can possibly be used to discriminate between various parameter changes in vivo, from noninvasive microscopy data.},
  author       = {García, Simón and Hannezo, Edouard B and Elgeti, Jens and Joanny, Jean and Silberzan, Pascal and Gov, Nir},
  journal      = {PNAS},
  number       = {50},
  pages        = {15314 -- 15319},
  publisher    = {National Academy of Sciences},
  title        = {{Physics of active jamming during collective cellular motion in a monolayer}},
  doi          = {10.1073/pnas.1510973112},
  volume       = {112},
  year         = {2015},
}

@article{7739,
  abstract     = {Currently, there is much debate on the genetic architecture of quantitative traits in wild populations. Is trait variation influenced by many genes of small effect or by a few genes of major effect? Where is additive genetic variation located in the genome? Do the same loci cause similar phenotypic variation in different populations? Great tits (Parus major) have been studied extensively in long‐term studies across Europe and consequently are considered an ecological ‘model organism’. Recently, genomic resources have been developed for the great tit, including a custom SNP chip and genetic linkage map. In this study, we used a suite of approaches to investigate the genetic architecture of eight quantitative traits in two long‐term study populations of great tits—one in the Netherlands and the other in the United Kingdom. Overall, we found little evidence for the presence of genes of large effects in either population. Instead, traits appeared to be influenced by many genes of small effect, with conservative estimates of the number of contributing loci ranging from 31 to 310. Despite concordance between population‐specific heritabilities, we found no evidence for the presence of loci having similar effects in both populations. While population‐specific genetic architectures are possible, an undetected shared architecture cannot be rejected because of limited power to map loci of small and moderate effects. This study is one of few examples of genetic architecture analysis in replicated wild populations and highlights some of the challenges and limitations researchers will face when attempting similar molecular quantitative genetic studies in free‐living populations.},
  author       = {Santure, Anna W. and Poissant, Jocelyn and De Cauwer, Isabelle and van Oers, Kees and Robinson, Matthew Richard and Quinn, John L. and Groenen, Martien A. M. and Visser, Marcel E. and Sheldon, Ben C. and Slate, Jon},
  issn         = {0962-1083},
  journal      = {Molecular Ecology},
  pages        = {6148--6162},
  publisher    = {Wiley},
  title        = {{Replicated analysis of the genetic architecture of quantitative traits in two wild great tit populations}},
  doi          = {10.1111/mec.13452},
  volume       = {24},
  year         = {2015},
}

@article{7741,
  abstract     = {Phenotypes expressed in a social context are not only a function of the individual, but can also be shaped by the phenotypes of social partners. These social effects may play a major role in the evolution of cooperative breeding if social partners differ in the quality of care they provide and if individual carers adjust their effort in relation to that of other carers. When applying social effects models to wild study systems, it is also important to explore sources of individual plasticity that could masquerade as social effects. We studied offspring provisioning rates of parents and helpers in a wild population of long-tailed tits Aegithalos caudatus using a quantitative genetic framework to identify these social effects and partition them into genetic, permanent environment and current environment components. Controlling for other effects, individuals were consistent in their provisioning effort at a given nest, but adjusted their effort based on who was in their social group, indicating the presence of social effects. However, these social effects differed between years and social contexts, indicating a current environment effect, rather than indicating a genetic or permanent environment effect. While this study reveals the importance of examining environmental and genetic sources of social effects, the framework we present is entirely general, enabling a greater understanding of potentially important social effects within any ecological population.},
  author       = {Adams, Mark James and Robinson, Matthew Richard and Mannarelli, Maria-Elena and Hatchwell, Ben J.},
  issn         = {0962-8452},
  journal      = {Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences},
  number       = {1810},
  publisher    = {The Royal Society},
  title        = {{Social genetic and social environment effects on parental and helper care in a cooperatively breeding bird}},
  doi          = {10.1098/rspb.2015.0689},
  volume       = {282},
  year         = {2015},
}

@unpublished{7779,
  abstract     = {The fact that a disordered material is not constrained in its properties in
the same way as a crystal presents significant and yet largely untapped
potential for novel material design. However, unlike their crystalline
counterparts, disordered solids are not well understood. One of the primary
obstacles is the lack of a theoretical framework for thinking about disorder
and its relation to mechanical properties. To this end, we study an idealized
system of frictionless athermal soft spheres that, when compressed, undergoes a
jamming phase transition with diverging length scales and clean power-law
signatures. This critical point is the cornerstone of a much larger "jamming
scenario" that has the potential to provide the essential theoretical
foundation necessary for a unified understanding of the mechanics of disordered
solids. We begin by showing that jammed sphere packings have a valid linear
regime despite the presence of "contact nonlinearities." We then investigate
the critical nature of the transition, focusing on diverging length scales and
finite-size effects. Next, we argue that jamming plays the same role for
disordered solids as the perfect crystal plays for crystalline solids. Not only
can it be considered an idealized starting point for understanding disordered
materials, but it can even influence systems that have a relatively high amount
of crystalline order. The behavior of solids can thus be thought of as existing
on a spectrum, with the perfect crystal and the jamming transition at opposing
ends. Finally, we introduce a new principle wherein the contribution of an
individual bond to one global property is independent of its contribution to
another. This principle allows the different global responses of a disordered
system to be manipulated independently and provides a great deal of flexibility
in designing materials with unique, textured and tunable properties.},
  author       = {Goodrich, Carl Peter},
  booktitle    = {arXiv:1510.08820},
  pages        = {242},
  title        = {{Unearthing the anticrystal: Criticality in the linear response of  disordered solids}},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{778,
  abstract     = {Several Hybrid Transactional Memory (HyTM) schemes have recently been proposed to complement the fast, but best-effort nature of Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM) with a slow, reliable software backup. However, the costs of providing concurrency between hardware and software transactions in HyTM are still not well understood. In this paper, we propose a general model for HyTM implementations, which captures the ability of hardware transactions to buffer memory accesses. The model allows us to formally quantify and analyze the amount of overhead (instrumentation) caused by the potential presence of software transactions.We prove that (1) it is impossible to build a strictly serializable HyTM implementation that has both uninstrumented reads and writes, even for very weak progress guarantees, and (2) the instrumentation cost incurred by a hardware transaction in any progressive opaque HyTM is linear in the size of the transaction’s data set.We further describe two implementations which exhibit optimal instrumentation costs for two different progress conditions. In sum, this paper proposes the first formal HyTM model and captures for the first time the trade-off between the degree of hardware-software TM concurrency and the amount of instrumentation overhead.},
  author       = {Alistarh, Dan-Adrian and Kopinsky, Justin and Kuznetsov, Petr and Ravi, Srivatsan and Shavit, Nir},
  pages        = {185 -- 199},
  publisher    = {Springer},
  title        = {{Inherent limitations of hybrid transactional memory}},
  doi          = {10.1007/978-3-662-48653-5_13},
  volume       = {9363},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{780,
  abstract     = {Population protocols are networks of finite-state agents, interacting randomly, and updating their states using simple rules. Despite their extreme simplicity, these systems have been shown to cooperatively perform complex computational tasks, such as simulating register machines to compute standard arithmetic functions. The election of a unique leader agent is a key requirement in such computational constructions. Yet, the fastest currently known population protocol for electing a leader only has linear convergence time, and it has recently been shown that no population protocol using a constant number of states per node may overcome this linear bound. In this paper, we give the first population protocol for leader election with polylogarithmic convergence time, using polylogarithmic memory states per node. The protocol structure is quite simple: each node has an associated value, and is either a leader (still in contention) or a minion (following some leader). A leader keeps incrementing its value and “defeats” other leaders in one-to-one interactions, and will drop from contention and become a minion if it meets a leader with higher value. Importantly, a leader also drops out if it meets a minion with higher absolute value. While these rules are quite simple, the proof that this algorithm achieves polylogarithmic convergence time is non-trivial. In particular, the argument combines careful use of concentration inequalities with anti-concentration bounds, showing that the leaders’ values become spread apart as the execution progresses, which in turn implies that straggling leaders get quickly eliminated. We complement our analysis with empirical results, showing that our protocol converges extremely fast, even for large network sizes.},
  author       = {Alistarh, Dan-Adrian and Gelashvili, Rati},
  pages        = {479 -- 491},
  publisher    = {Springer},
  title        = {{Polylogarithmic-time leader election in population protocols}},
  doi          = {10.1007/978-3-662-47666-6_38},
  volume       = {9135},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{783,
  abstract     = {The problem of electing a leader from among n contenders is one of the fundamental questions in distributed computing. In its simplest formulation, the task is as follows: given n processors, all participants must eventually return a win or lose indication, such that a single contender may win. Despite a considerable amount of work on leader election, the following question is still open: can we elect a leader in an asynchronous fault-prone system faster than just running a Θ(log n)-time tournament, against a strong adaptive adversary? In this paper, we answer this question in the affirmative, improving on a decades-old upper bound. We introduce two new algorithmic ideas to reduce the time complexity of electing a leader to O(log∗ n), using O(n2) point-to-point messages. A non-trivial application of our algorithm is a new upper bound for the tight renaming problem, assigning n items to the n participants in expected O(log2 n) time and O(n2) messages. We complement our results with lower bound of Ω(n2) messages for solving these two problems, closing the question of their message complexity.},
  author       = {Alistarh, Dan-Adrian and Gelashvili, Rati and Vladu, Adrian},
  pages        = {365 -- 374},
  publisher    = {ACM},
  title        = {{How to elect a leader faster than a tournament}},
  doi          = {10.1145/2767386.2767420},
  volume       = {2015-July},
  year         = {2015},
}

@unpublished{8183,
  abstract     = {We study conditions under which a finite simplicial complex $K$ can be mapped to $\mathbb R^d$ without higher-multiplicity intersections. An almost $r$-embedding is a map $f: K\to \mathbb R^d$ such that the images of any $r$
pairwise disjoint simplices of $K$ do not have a common point. We show that if $r$ is not a prime power and $d\geq 2r+1$, then there is a counterexample to the topological Tverberg conjecture, i.e., there is an almost $r$-embedding of
the $(d+1)(r-1)$-simplex in $\mathbb R^d$. This improves on previous constructions of counterexamples (for $d\geq 3r$) based on a series of papers by M. \"Ozaydin, M. Gromov, P. Blagojevi\'c, F. Frick, G. Ziegler, and the second and fourth present authors. The counterexamples are obtained by proving the following algebraic criterion in codimension 2: If $r\ge3$ and if $K$ is a finite $2(r-1)$-complex then there exists an almost $r$-embedding $K\to \mathbb R^{2r}$ if and only if there exists a general position PL map $f:K\to \mathbb R^{2r}$ such that the algebraic intersection number of the $f$-images of any $r$ pairwise disjoint simplices of $K$ is zero. This result can be restated in terms of cohomological obstructions or equivariant maps, and extends an analogous codimension 3 criterion by the second and fourth authors. As another application we classify ornaments $f:S^3 \sqcup S^3\sqcup S^3\to \mathbb R^5$ up to ornament
concordance. It follows from work of M. Freedman, V. Krushkal and P. Teichner that the analogous criterion for $r=2$ is false. We prove a lemma on singular higher-dimensional Borromean rings, yielding an elementary proof of the counterexample.},
  author       = {Avvakumov, Sergey and Mabillard, Isaac and Skopenkov, A. and Wagner, Uli},
  booktitle    = {arXiv},
  title        = {{Eliminating higher-multiplicity intersections, III. Codimension 2}},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{1481,
  abstract     = {Simple board games, like Tic-Tac-Toe and CONNECT-4, play an important role not only in the development of mathematical and logical skills, but also in the emotional and social development. In this paper, we address the problem of generating targeted starting positions for such games. This can facilitate new approaches for bringing novice players to mastery, and also leads to discovery of interesting game variants. We present an approach that generates starting states of varying hardness levels for player 1 in a two-player board game, given rules of the board game, the desired number of steps required for player 1 to win, and the expertise levels of the two players. Our approach leverages symbolic methods and iterative simulation to efficiently search the extremely large state space. We present experimental results that include discovery of states of varying hardness levels for several simple grid-based board games. The presence of such states for standard game variants like 4×4 Tic-Tac-Toe opens up new games to be played that have never been played as the default start state is heavily biased. },
  author       = {Ahmed, Umair and Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Gulwani, Sumit},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  location     = {Austin, TX, USA},
  pages        = {745 -- 752},
  publisher    = {AAAI Press},
  title        = {{Automatic generation of alternative starting positions for simple traditional board games}},
  volume       = {2},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{1483,
  abstract     = {Topological data analysis offers a rich source of valuable information to study vision problems. Yet, so far we lack a theoretically sound connection to popular kernel-based learning techniques, such as kernel SVMs or kernel PCA. In this work, we establish such a connection by designing a multi-scale kernel for persistence diagrams, a stable summary representation of topological features in data. We show that this kernel is positive definite and prove its stability with respect to the 1-Wasserstein distance. Experiments on two benchmark datasets for 3D shape classification/retrieval and texture recognition show considerable performance gains of the proposed method compared to an alternative approach that is based on the recently introduced persistence landscapes.},
  author       = {Reininghaus, Jan and Huber, Stefan and Bauer, Ulrich and Kwitt, Roland},
  location     = {Boston, MA, USA},
  pages        = {4741 -- 4748},
  publisher    = {IEEE},
  title        = {{A stable multi-scale kernel for topological machine learning}},
  doi          = {10.1109/CVPR.2015.7299106},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{1495,
  abstract     = {Motivated by biological questions, we study configurations of equal-sized disks in the Euclidean plane that neither pack nor cover. Measuring the quality by the probability that a random point lies in exactly one disk, we show that the regular hexagonal grid gives the maximum among lattice configurations. },
  author       = {Edelsbrunner, Herbert and Iglesias Ham, Mabel and Kurlin, Vitaliy},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 27th Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry},
  location     = {Ontario, Canada},
  pages        = {128--135},
  publisher    = {Queen's University},
  title        = {{Relaxed disk packing}},
  volume       = {2015-August},
  year         = {2015},
}

@article{1497,
  abstract     = {Detecting allelic biases from high-throughput sequencing data requires an approach that maximises sensitivity while minimizing false positives. Here, we present Allelome.PRO, an automated user-friendly bioinformatics pipeline, which uses high-throughput sequencing data from reciprocal crosses of two genetically distinct mouse strains to detect allele-specific expression and chromatin modifications. Allelome.PRO extends approaches used in previous studies that exclusively analyzed imprinted expression to give a complete picture of the ‘allelome’ by automatically categorising the allelic expression of all genes in a given cell type into imprinted, strain-biased, biallelic or non-informative. Allelome.PRO offers increased sensitivity to analyze lowly expressed transcripts, together with a robust false discovery rate empirically calculated from variation in the sequencing data. We used RNA-seq data from mouse embryonic fibroblasts from F1 reciprocal crosses to determine a biologically relevant allelic ratio cutoff, and define for the first time an entire allelome. Furthermore, we show that Allelome.PRO detects differential enrichment of H3K4me3 over promoters from ChIP-seq data validating the RNA-seq results. This approach can be easily extended to analyze histone marks of active enhancers, or transcription factor binding sites and therefore provides a powerful tool to identify candidate cis regulatory elements genome wide.},
  author       = {Andergassen, Daniel and Dotter, Christoph and Kulinski, Tomasz and Guenzl, Philipp and Bammer, Philipp and Barlow, Denise and Pauler, Florian and Hudson, Quanah},
  journal      = {Nucleic Acids Research},
  number       = {21},
  publisher    = {Oxford University Press},
  title        = {{Allelome.PRO, a pipeline to define allele-specific genomic features from high-throughput sequencing data}},
  doi          = {10.1093/nar/gkv727},
  volume       = {43},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{1498,
  abstract     = {Fault-tolerant distributed algorithms play an important role in many critical/high-availability applications. These algorithms are notoriously difficult to implement correctly, due to asynchronous communication and the occurrence of faults, such as the network dropping messages or computers crashing. Nonetheless there is surprisingly little language and verification support to build distributed systems based on fault-tolerant algorithms. In this paper, we present some of the challenges that a designer has to overcome to implement a fault-tolerant distributed system. Then we review different models that have been proposed to reason about distributed algorithms and sketch how such a model can form the basis for a domain-specific programming language. Adopting a high-level programming model can simplify the programmer's life and make the code amenable to automated verification, while still compiling to efficiently executable code. We conclude by summarizing the current status of an ongoing language design and implementation project that is based on this idea.},
  author       = {Dragoi, Cezara and Henzinger, Thomas A and Zufferey, Damien},
  isbn         = {978-3-939897-80-4 },
  location     = {Asilomar, CA, United States},
  pages        = {90 -- 102},
  publisher    = {Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik},
  title        = {{The need for language support for fault-tolerant distributed systems}},
  doi          = {10.4230/LIPIcs.SNAPL.2015.90},
  volume       = {32},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{1499,
  abstract     = {We consider weighted automata with both positive and negative integer weights on edges and
study the problem of synchronization using adaptive strategies that may only observe whether
the current weight-level is negative or nonnegative. We show that the synchronization problem is decidable in polynomial time for deterministic weighted automata.},
  author       = {Kretinsky, Jan and Larsen, Kim and Laursen, Simon and Srba, Jiří},
  location     = {Madrid, Spain},
  pages        = {142 -- 154},
  publisher    = {Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik},
  title        = {{Polynomial time decidability of weighted synchronization under partial observability}},
  doi          = {10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2015.142},
  volume       = {42},
  year         = {2015},
}

@article{1501,
  abstract     = {We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) which are a standard model for probabilistic systems. We focus on qualitative properties for MDPs that can express that desired behaviors of the system arise almost-surely (with probability 1) or with positive probability. We introduce a new simulation relation to capture the refinement relation of MDPs with respect to qualitative properties, and present discrete graph algorithms with quadratic complexity to compute the simulation relation. We present an automated technique for assume-guarantee style reasoning for compositional analysis of two-player games by giving a counterexample guided abstraction-refinement approach to compute our new simulation relation. We show a tight link between two-player games and MDPs, and as a consequence the results for games are lifted to MDPs with qualitative properties. We have implemented our algorithms and show that the compositional analysis leads to significant improvements. },
  author       = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Chmelik, Martin and Daca, Przemyslaw},
  journal      = {Formal Methods in System Design},
  number       = {2},
  pages        = {230 -- 264},
  publisher    = {Springer},
  title        = {{CEGAR for compositional analysis of qualitative properties in Markov decision processes}},
  doi          = {10.1007/s10703-015-0235-2},
  volume       = {47},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{1502,
  abstract     = {We extend the theory of input-output conformance with operators for merge and quotient. The former is useful when testing against multiple requirements or views. The latter can be used to generate tests for patches of an already tested system. Both operators can combine systems with different action alphabets, which is usually the case when constructing complex systems and specifications from parts, for instance different views as well as newly defined functionality of a~previous version of the system.},
  author       = {Beneš, Nikola and Daca, Przemyslaw and Henzinger, Thomas A and Kretinsky, Jan and Nickovic, Dejan},
  isbn         = {978-1-4503-3471-6},
  location     = {Montreal, QC, Canada},
  pages        = {101 -- 110},
  publisher    = {ACM},
  title        = {{Complete composition operators for IOCO-testing theory}},
  doi          = {10.1145/2737166.2737175},
  year         = {2015},
}

@article{1503,
  abstract     = {A Herman-Avila-Bochi type formula is obtained for the average sum of the top d Lyapunov exponents over a one-parameter family of double-struck G-cocycles, where double-struck G is the group that leaves a certain, non-degenerate Hermitian form of signature (c, d) invariant. The generic example of such a group is the pseudo-unitary group U(c, d) or, in the case c = d, the Hermitian-symplectic group HSp(2d) which naturally appears for cocycles related to Schrödinger operators. In the case d = 1, the formula for HSp(2d) cocycles reduces to the Herman-Avila-Bochi formula for SL(2, ℝ) cocycles.},
  author       = {Sadel, Christian},
  journal      = {Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems},
  number       = {5},
  pages        = {1582 -- 1591},
  publisher    = {Cambridge University Press},
  title        = {{A Herman-Avila-Bochi formula for higher-dimensional pseudo-unitary and Hermitian-symplectic-cocycles}},
  doi          = {10.1017/etds.2013.103},
  volume       = {35},
  year         = {2015},
}

@article{1504,
  abstract     = {Let Q = (Q1, . . . , Qn) be a random vector drawn from the uniform distribution on the set of all n! permutations of {1, 2, . . . , n}. Let Z = (Z1, . . . , Zn), where Zj is the mean zero variance one random variable obtained by centralizing and normalizing Qj , j = 1, . . . , n. Assume that Xi , i = 1, . . . ,p are i.i.d. copies of 1/√ p Z and X = Xp,n is the p × n random matrix with Xi as its ith row. Then Sn = XX is called the p × n Spearman's rank correlation matrix which can be regarded as a high dimensional extension of the classical nonparametric statistic Spearman's rank correlation coefficient between two independent random variables. In this paper, we establish a CLT for the linear spectral statistics of this nonparametric random matrix model in the scenario of high dimension, namely, p = p(n) and p/n→c ∈ (0,∞) as n→∞.We propose a novel evaluation scheme to estimate the core quantity in Anderson and Zeitouni's cumulant method in [Ann. Statist. 36 (2008) 2553-2576] to bypass the so-called joint cumulant summability. In addition, we raise a two-step comparison approach to obtain the explicit formulae for the mean and covariance functions in the CLT. Relying on this CLT, we then construct a distribution-free statistic to test complete independence for components of random vectors. Owing to the nonparametric property, we can use this test on generally distributed random variables including the heavy-tailed ones.},
  author       = {Bao, Zhigang and Lin, Liang and Pan, Guangming and Zhou, Wang},
  journal      = {Annals of Statistics},
  number       = {6},
  pages        = {2588 -- 2623},
  publisher    = {Institute of Mathematical Statistics},
  title        = {{Spectral statistics of large dimensional spearman s rank correlation matrix and its application}},
  doi          = {10.1214/15-AOS1353},
  volume       = {43},
  year         = {2015},
}

@article{1505,
  abstract     = {This paper is aimed at deriving the universality of the largest eigenvalue of a class of high-dimensional real or complex sample covariance matrices of the form W N =Σ 1/2XX∗Σ 1/2 . Here, X = (xij )M,N is an M× N random matrix with independent entries xij , 1 ≤ i M,≤ 1 ≤ j ≤ N such that Exij = 0, E|xij |2 = 1/N . On dimensionality, we assume that M = M(N) and N/M → d ε (0, ∞) as N ∞→. For a class of general deterministic positive-definite M × M matrices Σ , under some additional assumptions on the distribution of xij 's, we show that the limiting behavior of the largest eigenvalue of W N is universal, via pursuing a Green function comparison strategy raised in [Probab. Theory Related Fields 154 (2012) 341-407, Adv. Math. 229 (2012) 1435-1515] by Erd″os, Yau and Yin for Wigner matrices and extended by Pillai and Yin [Ann. Appl. Probab. 24 (2014) 935-1001] to sample covariance matrices in the null case (&amp;Epsi = I ). Consequently, in the standard complex case (Ex2 ij = 0), combing this universality property and the results known for Gaussian matrices obtained by El Karoui in [Ann. Probab. 35 (2007) 663-714] (nonsingular case) and Onatski in [Ann. Appl. Probab. 18 (2008) 470-490] (singular case), we show that after an appropriate normalization the largest eigenvalue of W N converges weakly to the type 2 Tracy-Widom distribution TW2 . Moreover, in the real case, we show that whenΣ is spiked with a fixed number of subcritical spikes, the type 1 Tracy-Widom limit TW1 holds for the normalized largest eigenvalue of W N , which extends a result of Féral and Péché in [J. Math. Phys. 50 (2009) 073302] to the scenario of nondiagonal Σ and more generally distributed X . In summary, we establish the Tracy-Widom type universality for the largest eigenvalue of generally distributed sample covariance matrices under quite light assumptions on &amp;Sigma . Applications of these limiting results to statistical signal detection and structure recognition of separable covariance matrices are also discussed.},
  author       = {Bao, Zhigang and Pan, Guangming and Zhou, Wang},
  journal      = {Annals of Statistics},
  number       = {1},
  pages        = {382 -- 421},
  publisher    = {Institute of Mathematical Statistics},
  title        = {{Universality for the largest eigenvalue of sample covariance matrices with general population}},
  doi          = {10.1214/14-AOS1281},
  volume       = {43},
  year         = {2015},
}

@article{1506,
  abstract     = {Consider the square random matrix An = (aij)n,n, where {aij:= a(n)ij , i, j = 1, . . . , n} is a collection of independent real random variables with means zero and variances one. Under the additional moment condition supn max1≤i,j ≤n Ea4ij &lt;∞, we prove Girko's logarithmic law of det An in the sense that as n→∞ log | detAn| ? (1/2) log(n-1)! d/→√(1/2) log n N(0, 1).},
  author       = {Bao, Zhigang and Pan, Guangming and Zhou, Wang},
  journal      = {Bernoulli},
  number       = {3},
  pages        = {1600 -- 1628},
  publisher    = {Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability},
  title        = {{The logarithmic law of random determinant}},
  doi          = {10.3150/14-BEJ615},
  volume       = {21},
  year         = {2015},
}

