The Dagstuhl Seminar Similarity-based Clustering and its Application to Medicine and Biology (07131) held in March 25–30, 2007, provided an excellent atmosphere for in-depth discussions about the research frontier of computational methods for relevant applications of biomedical clustering and beyond. We address some highlighted issues about correlation-based data analysis in this seminar postri...

Most of the work on partial evaluation, to date, relies on using knowledge about data values to guide specialization of program code. In this abstract we discuss the use of partial evaluation for the dual optimization, of using knowledge about a program to guide the specialization of data representations. Preliminary experiments suggest that this can yield signiicant performance improvements fo...

Over the last years, users’ information needs over structured data expanded from seeking exact answers to precise queries, to performing database analytics tasks, such as finding entities or patterns similar to a given entity or pattern, discovering interesting patterns, or predicting novel relations and concepts. As part of its response, the research community proposed a multitude of algorithm...

We have studied spontaneous imbibition fronts generated by capillary rise between two roughened glass plates, the separation d of which varied between 10 and 50 microm. Perfect agreement with Washburn's law was obtained. We have determined the roughness exponent chi of the fronts, and found chi=0.81+/-0.01 for small length scales. Above a certain crossover length xi, it reached chi=0.58+/-0.04,...

When surface wetting drives liquids to invade porous media or microstructured materials with uniform channels, the penetration distance is known to increase as the square root of time. We demonstrate, experimentally and theoretically, that shape variations of the channel, in the flow direction, modify this ‘diffusive’ response. At short times, the shape variations are not significant and the im...

The amount of electronic data available today as well as its dimensionality and complexity increases rapidly in many scientific areas including biology, (bio-)chemistry, medicine, physics and its application fields like robotics, bioinformatics or multimedia technologies. Many of these data sets are very complex but have also a simple inherent structure which allows an appropriate sparse repres...

Imbibition, the displacement of a nonwetting fluid by wetting fluid, plays central role in diverse energy, environmental, and industrial processes. While this process is typically studied homogeneous porous media with uniform permeabilities, many cases, have multiple parallel strata different permeabilities. How such stratification impacts dynamics imbibition, as well saturation after breaks th...

The transition from seed to seedling is mediated by germination, a complex process that starts with imbibition and completes with radicle emergence. To gain insight into the transcriptional program mediating germination, previous studies have compared the transcript profiles of dry, dormant, and germinating after-ripened Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) seeds. While informative, these approac...