@article{5914,
  abstract     = {With the advent of optogenetics, it became possible to change the activity of a targeted population of neurons in a temporally controlled manner. To combine the advantages of 60-channel in vivo tetrode recording and laser-based optogenetics, we have developed a closed-loop recording system that allows for the actual electrophysiological signal to be used as a trigger for the laser light mediating the optogenetic intervention. We have optimized the weight, size, and shape of the corresponding implant to make it compatible with the size, force, and movements of a behaving mouse, and we have shown that the system can efficiently block sharp wave ripple (SWR) events using those events themselves as a trigger. To demonstrate the full potential of the optogenetic recording system we present a pilot study addressing the contribution of SWR events to learning in a complex behavioral task.},
  author       = {Rangel Guerrero, Dámaris K and Donnett, James G. and Csicsvari, Jozsef L and Kovács, Krisztián},
  journal      = {eNeuro},
  number       = {4},
  publisher    = {Society of Neuroscience},
  title        = {{Tetrode recording from the hippocampus of behaving mice coupled with four-point-irradiation closed-loop optogenetics: A technique to study the contribution of Hippocampal SWR events to learning}},
  doi          = {10.1523/ENEURO.0087-18.2018},
  volume       = {5},
  year         = {2018},
}

@inproceedings{5959,
  abstract     = {Formalizing properties of systems with continuous dynamics is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a formal framework for specifying and monitoring rich temporal properties of real-valued signals. We introduce signal first-order logic (SFO) as a specification language that combines first-order logic with linear-real arithmetic and unary function symbols interpreted as piecewise-linear signals. We first show that while the satisfiability problem for SFO is undecidable, its membership and monitoring problems are decidable. We develop an offline monitoring procedure for SFO that has polynomial complexity in the size of the input trace and the specification, for a fixed number of quantifiers and function symbols. We show that the algorithm has computation time linear in the size of the input trace for the important fragment of bounded-response specifications interpreted over input traces with finite variability. We can use our results to extend signal temporal logic with first-order quantifiers over time and value parameters, while preserving its efficient monitoring. We finally demonstrate the practical appeal of our logic through a case study in the micro-electronics domain.},
  author       = {Bakhirkin, Alexey and Ferrere, Thomas and Henzinger, Thomas A and Nickovicl, Deian},
  booktitle    = {2018 International Conference on Embedded Software},
  isbn         = {9781538655603},
  location     = {Turin, Italy},
  pages        = {1--10},
  publisher    = {IEEE},
  title        = {{Keynote: The first-order logic of signals}},
  doi          = {10.1109/emsoft.2018.8537203},
  year         = {2018},
}

@article{5960,
  abstract     = {In this paper we present a reliable method to verify the existence of loops along the uncertain trajectory of a robot, based on proprioceptive measurements only, within a bounded-error context. The loop closure detection is one of the key points in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) methods, especially in homogeneous environments with difficult scenes recognitions. The proposed approach is generic and could be coupled with conventional SLAM algorithms to reliably reduce their computing burden, thus improving the localization and mapping processes in the most challenging environments such as unexplored underwater extents. To prove that a robot performed a loop whatever the uncertainties in its evolution, we employ the notion of topological degree that originates in the field of differential topology. We show that a verification tool based on the topological degree is an optimal method for proving robot loops. This is demonstrated both on datasets from real missions involving autonomous underwater vehicles and by a mathematical discussion.},
  author       = {Rohou, Simon and Franek, Peter and Aubry, Clément and Jaulin, Luc},
  issn         = {1741-3176},
  journal      = {The International Journal of Robotics Research},
  number       = {12},
  pages        = {1500--1516},
  publisher    = {SAGE Publications},
  title        = {{Proving the existence of loops in robot trajectories}},
  doi          = {10.1177/0278364918808367},
  volume       = {37},
  year         = {2018},
}

@inproceedings{5961,
  abstract     = {The area of machine learning has made considerable progress over the past decade, enabled by the widespread availability of large datasets, as well as by improved algorithms and models. Given the large computational demands of machine learning workloads, parallelism, implemented either through single-node concurrency or through multi-node distribution, has been a third key ingredient to advances in machine learning.
The goal of this tutorial is to provide the audience with an overview of standard distribution techniques in machine learning, with an eye towards the intriguing trade-offs between synchronization and communication costs of distributed machine learning algorithms, on the one hand, and their convergence, on the other.The tutorial will focus on parallelization strategies for the fundamental stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm, which is a key tool when training machine learning models, from classical instances such as linear regression, to state-of-the-art neural network architectures.
The tutorial will describe the guarantees provided by this algorithm in the sequential case, and then move on to cover both shared-memory and message-passing parallelization strategies, together with the guarantees they provide, and corresponding trade-offs. The presentation will conclude with a broad overview of ongoing research in distributed and concurrent machine learning. The tutorial will assume no prior knowledge beyond familiarity with basic concepts in algebra and analysis.
},
  author       = {Alistarh, Dan-Adrian},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing  - PODC '18},
  isbn         = {9781450357951},
  location     = {Egham, United Kingdom},
  pages        = {487--488},
  publisher    = {ACM Press},
  title        = {{A brief tutorial on distributed and concurrent machine learning}},
  doi          = {10.1145/3212734.3212798},
  year         = {2018},
}

@inproceedings{5962,
  abstract     = {Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a fundamental algorithm in machine learning, representing the optimization backbone for training several classic models, from regression to neural networks. Given the recent practical focus on distributed machine learning, significant work has been dedicated to the convergence properties of this algorithm under the inconsistent and noisy updates arising from execution in a distributed environment. However, surprisingly, the convergence properties of this classic algorithm in the standard shared-memory model are still not well-understood. In this work, we address this gap, and provide new convergence bounds for lock-free concurrent stochastic gradient descent, executing in the classic asynchronous shared memory model, against a strong adaptive adversary. Our results give improved upper and lower bounds on the "price of asynchrony'' when executing the fundamental SGD algorithm in a concurrent setting. They show that this classic optimization tool can converge faster and with a wider range of parameters than previously known under asynchronous iterations. At the same time, we exhibit a fundamental trade-off between the maximum delay in the system and the rate at which SGD can converge, which governs the set of parameters under which this algorithm can still work efficiently.},
  author       = {Alistarh, Dan-Adrian and De Sa, Christopher and Konstantinov, Nikola H},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing  - PODC '18},
  isbn         = {9781450357951},
  location     = {Egham, United Kingdom},
  pages        = {169--178},
  publisher    = {ACM Press},
  title        = {{The convergence of stochastic gradient descent in asynchronous shared memory}},
  doi          = {10.1145/3212734.3212763},
  year         = {2018},
}

@inproceedings{5963,
  abstract     = {There has been significant progress in understanding the parallelism inherent to iterative sequential algorithms: for many classic algorithms, the depth of the dependence structure is now well understood, and scheduling techniques have been developed to exploit this shallow dependence structure for efficient parallel implementations. A related, applied research strand has studied methods by which certain iterative task-based algorithms can be efficiently parallelized via relaxed concurrent priority schedulers. These allow for high concurrency when inserting and removing tasks, at the cost of executing superfluous work due to the relaxed semantics of the scheduler. In this work, we take a step towards unifying these two research directions, by showing that there exists a family of relaxed priority schedulers that can efficiently and deterministically execute classic iterative algorithms such as greedy maximal independent set (MIS) and matching. Our primary result shows that, given a randomized scheduler with an expected relaxation factor of k in terms of the maximum allowed priority inversions on a task, and any graph on n vertices, the scheduler is able to execute greedy MIS with only an additive factor of \poly(k) expected additional iterations compared to an exact (but not scalable) scheduler. This counter-intuitive result demonstrates that the overhead of relaxation when computing MIS is not dependent on the input size or structure of the input graph. Experimental results show that this overhead can be clearly offset by the gain in performance due to the highly scalable scheduler. In sum, we present an efficient method to deterministically parallelize iterative sequential algorithms, with provable runtime guarantees in terms of the number of executed tasks to completion.},
  author       = {Alistarh, Dan-Adrian and Brown, Trevor A and Kopinsky, Justin and Nadiradze, Giorgi},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing  - PODC '18},
  isbn         = {9781450357951},
  location     = {Egham, United Kingdom},
  pages        = {377--386},
  publisher    = {ACM Press},
  title        = {{Relaxed schedulers can efficiently parallelize iterative algorithms}},
  doi          = {10.1145/3212734.3212756},
  year         = {2018},
}

@inproceedings{5964,
  abstract     = {A standard design pattern found in many concurrent data structures, such as hash tables or ordered containers, is an alternation of parallelizable sections that incur no data conflicts and critical sections that must run sequentially and are protected with locks. A lock can be viewed as a queue that arbitrates the order in which the critical sections are executed, and a natural question is whether we can use stochastic analysis to predict the resulting throughput. As a preliminary evidence to the affirmative, we describe a simple model that can be used to predict the throughput of coarse-grained lock-based algorithms. We show that our model works well for CLH lock, and we expect it to work for other popular lock designs such as TTAS, MCS, etc.},
  author       = {Aksenov, Vitaly and Alistarh, Dan-Adrian and Kuznetsov, Petr},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing  - PODC '18},
  isbn         = {9781450357951},
  location     = {Egham, United Kingdom},
  pages        = {411--413},
  publisher    = {ACM Press},
  title        = {{Brief Announcement: Performance prediction for coarse-grained locking}},
  doi          = {10.1145/3212734.3212785},
  year         = {2018},
}

@inproceedings{5965,
  abstract     = {Relaxed concurrent data structures have become increasingly popular, due to their scalability in graph processing and machine learning applications (\citeNguyen13, gonzalez2012powergraph ). Despite considerable interest, there exist families of natural, high performing randomized relaxed concurrent data structures, such as the popular MultiQueue~\citeMQ pattern for implementing relaxed priority queue data structures, for which no guarantees are known in the concurrent setting~\citeAKLN17. Our main contribution is in showing for the first time that, under a set of analytic assumptions, a family of relaxed concurrent data structures, including variants of MultiQueues, but also a new approximate counting algorithm we call the MultiCounter, provides strong probabilistic guarantees on the degree of relaxation with respect to the sequential specification, in arbitrary concurrent executions. We formalize these guarantees via a new correctness condition called distributional linearizability, tailored to concurrent implementations with randomized relaxations. Our result is based on a new analysis of an asynchronous variant of the classic power-of-two-choices load balancing algorithm, in which placement choices can be based on inconsistent, outdated information (this result may be of independent interest). We validate our results empirically, showing that the MultiCounter algorithm can implement scalable relaxed timestamps.},
  author       = {Alistarh, Dan-Adrian and Brown, Trevor A and Kopinsky, Justin and Li, Jerry Z. and Nadiradze, Giorgi},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 30th on Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures  - SPAA '18},
  isbn         = {9781450357999},
  location     = {Vienna, Austria},
  pages        = {133--142},
  publisher    = {ACM Press},
  title        = {{Distributionally linearizable data structures}},
  doi          = {10.1145/3210377.3210411},
  year         = {2018},
}

@inproceedings{5966,
  abstract     = {The transactional conflict problem arises in transactional systems whenever two or more concurrent transactions clash on a data item. While the standard solution to such conflicts is to immediately abort one of the transactions, some practical systems consider the alternative of delaying conflict resolution for a short interval, which may allow one of the transactions to commit. The challenge in the transactional conflict problem is to choose the optimal length of this delay interval so as to minimize the overall running time penalty for the conflicting transactions. In this paper, we propose a family of optimal online algorithms for the transactional conflict problem. Specifically, we consider variants of this problem which arise in different implementations of transactional systems, namely "requestor wins'' and "requestor aborts'' implementations: in the former, the recipient of a coherence request is aborted, whereas in the latter, it is the requestor which has to abort. Both strategies are implemented by real systems. We show that the requestor aborts case can be reduced to a classic instance of the ski rental problem, while the requestor wins case leads to a new version of this classical problem, for which we derive optimal deterministic and randomized algorithms. Moreover, we prove that, under a simplified adversarial model, our algorithms are constant-competitive with the offline optimum in terms of throughput. We validate our algorithmic results empirically through a hardware simulation of hardware transactional memory (HTM), showing that our algorithms can lead to non-trivial performance improvements for classic concurrent data structures.},
  author       = {Alistarh, Dan-Adrian and Haider, Syed Kamran and Kübler, Raphael and Nadiradze, Giorgi},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 30th on Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures  - SPAA '18},
  isbn         = {9781450357999},
  location     = {Vienna, Austria},
  pages        = {383--392},
  publisher    = {ACM Press},
  title        = {{The transactional conflict problem}},
  doi          = {10.1145/3210377.3210406},
  year         = {2018},
}

@inproceedings{5967,
  abstract     = {The Big Match is a multi-stage two-player game. In each stage Player 1 hides one or two pebbles in his hand, and his opponent has to guess that number; Player 1 loses a point if Player 2 is correct, and otherwise he wins a point. As soon as Player 1 hides one pebble, the players cannot change their choices in any future stage.
Blackwell and Ferguson (1968) give an ε-optimal strategy for Player 1 that hides, in each stage, one pebble with a probability that depends on the entire past history. Any strategy that depends just on the clock or on a finite memory is worthless. The long-standing natural open problem has been whether every strategy that depends just on the clock and a finite memory is worthless. We prove that there is such a strategy that is ε-optimal. In fact, we show that just two states of memory are sufficient.
},
  author       = {Hansen, Kristoffer Arnsfelt and Ibsen-Jensen, Rasmus and Neyman, Abraham},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation  - EC '18},
  isbn         = {9781450358293},
  location     = {Ithaca, NY, United States},
  pages        = {149--150},
  publisher    = {ACM Press},
  title        = {{The Big Match with a clock and a bit of memory}},
  doi          = {10.1145/3219166.3219198},
  year         = {2018},
}

@article{5971,
  abstract     = {We consider a Wigner-type ensemble, i.e. large hermitian N×N random matrices H=H∗ with centered independent entries and with a general matrix of variances Sxy=𝔼∣∣Hxy∣∣2. The norm of H is asymptotically given by the maximum of the support of the self-consistent density of states. We establish a bound on this maximum in terms of norms of powers of S that substantially improves the earlier bound 2∥S∥1/2∞ given in [O. Ajanki, L. Erdős and T. Krüger, Universality for general Wigner-type matrices, Prob. Theor. Rel. Fields169 (2017) 667–727]. The key element of the proof is an effective Markov chain approximation for the contributions of the weighted Dyck paths appearing in the iterative solution of the corresponding Dyson equation.},
  author       = {Erdös, László and Mühlbacher, Peter},
  issn         = {2010-3271},
  journal      = {Random matrices: Theory and applications},
  publisher    = {World Scientific Publishing},
  title        = {{Bounds on the norm of Wigner-type random matrices}},
  doi          = {10.1142/s2010326319500096},
  year         = {2018},
}

@article{5975,
  abstract     = {We consider the recent formulation of the algorithmic Lov ́asz Local Lemma  [N. Har-vey and J. Vondr ́ak, inProceedings of FOCS, 2015, pp. 1327–1345; D. Achlioptas and F. Iliopoulos,inProceedings of SODA, 2016, pp. 2024–2038; D. Achlioptas, F. Iliopoulos, and V. Kolmogorov,ALocal Lemma for Focused Stochastic Algorithms, arXiv preprint, 2018] for finding objects that avoid“bad  features,”  or  “flaws.”   It  extends  the  Moser–Tardos  resampling  algorithm  [R.  A.  Moser  andG. Tardos,J. ACM, 57 (2010), 11] to more general discrete spaces.  At each step the method picks aflaw present in the current state and goes to a new state according to some prespecified probabilitydistribution (which depends on the current state and the selected flaw).  However, the recent formu-lation is less flexible than the Moser–Tardos method since it requires a specific flaw selection rule,whereas the algorithm of Moser and Tardos allows an arbitrary rule (and thus can potentially beimplemented more efficiently).  We formulate a new “commutativity” condition and prove that it issufficient for an arbitrary rule to work.  It also enables an efficient parallelization under an additionalassumption.  We then show that existing resampling oracles for perfect matchings and permutationsdo satisfy this condition.},
  author       = {Kolmogorov, Vladimir},
  issn         = {1095-7111},
  journal      = {SIAM Journal on Computing},
  number       = {6},
  pages        = {2029--2056},
  publisher    = {Society for Industrial & Applied Mathematics (SIAM)},
  title        = {{Commutativity in the algorithmic Lovász local lemma}},
  doi          = {10.1137/16m1093306},
  volume       = {47},
  year         = {2018},
}

@article{5976,
  abstract     = {We propose FlexMaps, a novel framework for fabricating smooth shapes out of flat, flexible panels with tailored mechanical properties. We start by mapping the 3D surface onto a 2D domain as in traditional UV mapping to design a set of deformable flat panels called FlexMaps. For these panels, we design and obtain specific mechanical properties such that, once they are assembled, the static equilibrium configuration matches the desired 3D shape. FlexMaps can be fabricated from an almost rigid material, such as wood or plastic, and are made flexible in a controlled way by using computationally designed spiraling microstructures.},
  author       = {Malomo, Luigi and Perez Rodriguez, Jesus and Iarussi, Emmanuel and Pietroni, Nico and Miguel, Eder and Cignoni, Paolo and Bickel, Bernd},
  issn         = {0730-0301},
  journal      = {ACM Transactions on Graphics},
  number       = {6},
  publisher    = {Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)},
  title        = {{FlexMaps: Computational design of flat flexible shells for shaping 3D objects}},
  doi          = {10.1145/3272127.3275076},
  volume       = {37},
  year         = {2018},
}

@inproceedings{5977,
  abstract     = {We consider the stochastic shortest path (SSP)problem for succinct Markov decision processes(MDPs), where the MDP consists of a set of vari-ables, and a set of nondeterministic rules that up-date the variables. First, we show that several ex-amples from the AI literature can be modeled assuccinct MDPs.  Then we present computationalapproaches for upper and lower bounds for theSSP problem: (a) for computing upper bounds, ourmethod is polynomial-time in the implicit descrip-tion of the MDP; (b) for lower bounds, we present apolynomial-time (in the size of the implicit descrip-tion) reduction to quadratic programming. Our ap-proach is applicable even to infinite-state MDPs.Finally, we present experimental results to demon-strate the effectiveness of our approach on severalclassical examples from the AI literature.},
  author       = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Fu, Hongfei and Goharshady, Amir and Okati, Nastaran},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  isbn         = {978-099924112-7},
  issn         = {10450823},
  location     = {Stockholm, Sweden},
  pages        = {4700--4707},
  publisher    = {IJCAI},
  title        = {{Computational approaches for stochastic shortest path on succinct MDPs}},
  doi          = {10.24963/ijcai.2018/653},
  volume       = {2018},
  year         = {2018},
}

@inproceedings{5978,
  abstract     = {We consider the MAP-inference problem for graphical models,which is a valued constraint satisfaction problem defined onreal numbers with a natural summation operation. We proposea family of relaxations (different from the famous Sherali-Adams hierarchy), which naturally define lower bounds for itsoptimum. This family always contains a tight relaxation andwe give an algorithm able to find it and therefore, solve theinitial non-relaxed NP-hard problem.The relaxations we consider decompose the original probleminto two non-overlapping parts: an easy LP-tight part and adifficult one. For the latter part a combinatorial solver must beused. As we show in our experiments, in a number of applica-tions the second, difficult part constitutes only a small fractionof the whole problem. This property allows to significantlyreduce the computational time of the combinatorial solver andtherefore solve problems which were out of reach before.},
  author       = {Haller, Stefan and Swoboda, Paul and Savchynskyy, Bogdan},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 32st AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  location     = {New Orleans, LU, United States},
  pages        = {6581--6588},
  publisher    = {AAAI Press},
  title        = {{Exact MAP-inference by confining combinatorial search with LP relaxation}},
  year         = {2018},
}

@article{5980,
  abstract     = {The problem of private set-intersection (PSI) has been traditionally treated as an instance of the more general problem of multi-party computation (MPC). Consequently, in order to argue security, or compose these protocols one has to rely on the general theory that was developed for the purpose of MPC. The pursuit of efficient protocols, however, has resulted in designs that exploit properties pertaining to PSI. In almost all practical applications where a PSI protocol is deployed, it is expected to be executed multiple times, possibly on related inputs. In this work we initiate a dedicated study of PSI in the multi-interaction (MI) setting. In this model a server sets up the common system parameters and executes set-intersection multiple times with potentially different clients. We discuss a few attacks that arise when protocols are naïvely composed in this manner and, accordingly, craft security definitions for the MI setting and study their inter-relation. Finally, we suggest a set of protocols that are MI-secure, at the same time almost as efficient as their parent, stand-alone, protocols.},
  author       = {Chatterjee, Sanjit and Kamath Hosdurg, Chethan and Kumar, Vikas},
  journal      = {American Institute of Mathematical Sciences},
  number       = {1},
  pages        = {17--47},
  publisher    = {AIMS},
  title        = {{Private set-intersection with common set-up}},
  doi          = {10.3934/amc.2018002},
  volume       = {12},
  year         = {2018},
}

@article{5982,
  abstract     = {In the present work, we detail a fast and simple solution-based method to synthesize hexagonal SnSe2 nanoplates (NPLs) and their use to produce crystallographically textured SnSe2 nanomaterials. We also demonstrate that the same strategy can be used to produce orthorhombic SnSe nanostructures and nanomaterials. NPLs are grown through a screw dislocation-driven mechanism. This mechanism typically results in pyramidal structures, but we demonstrate here that the growth from multiple dislocations results in flower-like structures. Crystallographically textured SnSe2 bulk nanomaterials obtained from the hot pressing of these SnSe2 structures display highly anisotropic charge and heat transport properties and thermoelectric (TE) figures of merit limited by relatively low electrical conductivities. To improve this parameter, SnSe2 NPLs are blended here with metal nanoparticles. The electrical conductivities of the blends are significantly improved with respect to bare SnSe2 NPLs, what translates into a three-fold increase of the TE Figure of merit, reaching unprecedented ZT values up to 0.65.},
  author       = {Zhang, Yu and Liu, Yu and Lim, Khak Ho and Xing, Congcong and Li, Mengyao and Zhang, Ting and Tang, Pengyi and Arbiol, Jordi and Llorca, Jordi and Ng, Ka Ming and Ibáñez, Maria and Guardia, Pablo and Prato, Mirko and Cadavid, Doris and Cabot, Andreu},
  issn         = {1433-7851},
  journal      = {Angewandte Chemie International Edition},
  number       = {52},
  pages        = {17063--17068},
  publisher    = {Wiley},
  title        = {{Tin diselenide molecular precursor for solution-processable thermoelectric materials}},
  doi          = {10.1002/anie.201809847},
  volume       = {57},
  year         = {2018},
}

@article{5983,
  abstract     = {We study a quantum impurity possessing both translational and internal rotational degrees of freedom interacting with a bosonic bath. Such a system corresponds to a “rotating polaron,” which can be used to model, e.g., a rotating molecule immersed in an ultracold Bose gas or superfluid helium. We derive the Hamiltonian of the rotating polaron and study its spectrum in the weak- and strong-coupling regimes using a combination of variational, diagrammatic, and mean-field approaches. We reveal how the coupling between linear and angular momenta affects stable quasiparticle states, and demonstrate that internal rotation leads to an enhanced self-localization in the translational degrees of freedom.},
  author       = {Yakaboylu, Enderalp and Midya, Bikashkali and Deuchert, Andreas and Leopold, Nikolai K and Lemeshko, Mikhail},
  issn         = {2469-9969},
  journal      = {Physical Review B},
  number       = {22},
  publisher    = {American Physical Society},
  title        = {{Theory of the rotating polaron: Spectrum and self-localization}},
  doi          = {10.1103/physrevb.98.224506},
  volume       = {98},
  year         = {2018},
}

@article{5984,
  abstract     = {G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) form the largest receptor family, relay environmental stimuli to changes in cell behavior and represent prime drug targets. Many GPCRs are classified as orphan receptors because of the limited knowledge on their ligands and coupling to cellular signaling machineries. Here, we engineer a library of 63 chimeric receptors that contain the signaling domains of human orphan and understudied GPCRs functionally linked to the light-sensing domain of rhodopsin. Upon stimulation with visible light, we identify activation of canonical cell signaling pathways, including cAMP-, Ca2+-, MAPK/ERK-, and Rho-dependent pathways, downstream of the engineered receptors. For the human pseudogene GPR33, we resurrect a signaling function that supports its hypothesized role as a pathogen entry site. These results demonstrate that substituting unknown chemical activators with a light switch can reveal information about protein function and provide an optically controlled protein library for exploring the physiology and therapeutic potential of understudied GPCRs.},
  author       = {Morri, Maurizio and Sanchez-Romero, Inmaculada and Tichy, Alexandra-Madelaine and Kainrath, Stephanie and Gerrard, Elliot J. and Hirschfeld, Priscila and Schwarz, Jan and Janovjak, Harald L},
  issn         = {2041-1723},
  journal      = {Nature Communications},
  number       = {1},
  publisher    = {Springer Nature},
  title        = {{Optical functionalization of human class A orphan G-protein-coupled receptors}},
  doi          = {10.1038/s41467-018-04342-1},
  volume       = {9},
  year         = {2018},
}

@article{5989,
  abstract     = {Schistosomes are the causative agents of schistosomiasis, a neglected tropical disease affecting over 230 million people worldwide.Additionally to their major impact on human health, they are also models of choice in evolutionary biology. These parasitic flatwormsare unique among the common hermaphroditic trematodes as they have separate sexes. This so-called “evolutionary scandal”displays a female heterogametic genetic sex-determination system (ZZ males and ZW females), as well as a pronounced adult sexualdimorphism. These phenotypic differences are determined by a shared set of genes in both sexes, potentially leading to intralocussexual conflicts. To resolve these conflicts in sexually selected traits, molecular mechanisms such as sex-biased gene expression couldoccur, but parent-of-origin gene expression also provides an alternative. In this work we investigated the latter mechanism, that is,genes expressed preferentially from either the maternal or the paternal allele, inSchistosoma mansonispecies. To this end, tran-scriptomes from male and female hybrid adults obtained by strain crosses were sequenced. Strain-specific single nucleotide poly-morphism (SNP) markers allowed us to discriminate the parental origin, while reciprocal crosses helped to differentiate parentalexpression from strain-specific expression. We identified genes containing SNPs expressed in a parent-of-origin manner consistentwith paternal and maternal imprints. Although the majority of the SNPs was identified in mitochondrial and Z-specific loci, theremaining SNPs found in male and female transcriptomes were situated in genes that have the potential to explain sexual differencesin schistosome parasites. Furthermore, we identified and validated four new Z-specific scaffolds.},
  author       = {Kincaid-Smith, Julien and Picard, Marion A L and Cosseau, Céline and Boissier, Jérôme and Severac, Dany and Grunau, Christoph and Toulza, Eve},
  issn         = {1759-6653},
  journal      = {Genome Biology and Evolution},
  number       = {3},
  pages        = {840--856},
  publisher    = {Oxford University Press},
  title        = {{Parent-of-Origin-Dependent Gene Expression in Male and Female Schistosome Parasites}},
  doi          = {10.1093/gbe/evy037},
  volume       = {10},
  year         = {2018},
}

