Deposits of clastic carbonate-dominated (calciclastic) sedimentary slope systems in the rock record have been identified mostly as linearly-consistent carbonate apron deposits, even though most ancient clastic carbonate slope deposits fit the submarine fan systems better. Calciclastic submarine fans are consequently rarely described and are poorly understood. Subsequently, very little is known especially in mud-dominated calciclastic submarine fan systems. Presented in this study are a sedimentological core and petrographic characterisation of samples from eleven boreholes from the Lower Carboniferous of Bowland Basin (Northwest England) that reveals a >250 m thick calciturbidite complex deposited in a calciclastic submarine fan setting. Seven facies are recognised from core and thin section characterisation and are grouped into three carbonate turbidite sequences. They include: 1) Calciturbidites, comprising mostly of highto low-density, wavy-laminated bioclast-rich facies; 2) low-density densite mudstones which are characterised by planar laminated and unlaminated muddominated facies; and 3) Calcidebrites which are muddy or hyper-concentrated debrisflow deposits occurring as poorly-sorted, chaotic, mud-supported floatstones. These

Phd by thesis

Communications of the ACM (CACM for short, not the best sounding acronym around) is the ACM’s flagship magazine. Started in 1957, CACM is handy for keeping up to date on current research being carried out across all topics of computer science and realworld applications. CACM has had an illustrious past with many influential pieces of work and debates started within its pages. These include Hoare’s presentation of the Quicksort algorithm; Rivest, Shamir and Adleman’s description of the first publickey cryptosystem RSA; and Dijkstra’s famous letter against the use of GOTO. In addition to the print edition, which is released monthly, there is a fantastic website (http://cacm.acm. org/) that showcases not only the most recent edition but all previous CACM articles as well, readable online as well as downloadable as a PDF. In addition, the website lets you browse for articles by subject, a handy feature if you want to focus on a particular topic. CACM is really essential reading. Pretty much guaranteed to contain content that is interesting to anyone, it keeps tabs on the latest in computer science. It is a valuable asset for us students, who tend to delve deep into a particular area of CS and forget everything that is happening around us. — Daniel Gooch U ndergraduate research is like a box of chocolates: You never know what kind of project you will get. That being said, there are still a few things you should know to get the most out of the experience.

Communications of the ACM

We present an exact partial enumerative algorithm for the maximum clique problem. The pruning device used is derived from graph colorings. Pruning of the search tree is accomplished not only by the number of colors used to color a tree subproblem but also by using information gained in the process of coloring. This leads to increased pruning which translates into improved computational performance. Experimental results on test problems are presented.

An exact algorithm for the maximum clique problem with accelerated pruning

Mathematical programming

: Significant progress has been made with solution of location problems and in preprocessing and decomposition for discrete optimization. There has also been research on the application of techniques from combinational optimization to nonlinear problems.

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a273552.pdf

Discrete Applied Mathematics

Local search with edge weighting and configuration checking heuristics for minimum vertex cover

The Minimum Vertex Cover (MVC) problem is a prominent NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem of great importance in both theory and application. Local search has proved successful for this problem. However, there are two main drawbacks in state-of-the-art MVC local search algorithms. First, they select a pair of vertices to exchange simultaneously, which is timeconsuming. Secondly, although using edge weighting techniques to diversify the search, these algorithms lack mechanisms for decreasing the weights. To address these issues, we propose two new strategies: two-stage exchange and edge weighting with forgetting. The two-stage exchange strategy selects two vertices to exchange separately and performs the exchange in two stages. The strategy of edge weighting with forgetting not only increases weights of uncovered edges, but also decreases some weights for each edge periodically. These two strategies are used in designing a new MVC local search algorithm, which is referred to as NuMVC.

We conduct extensive experimental studies on the standard benchmarks, namely DIMACS and BHOSLIB. The experiment comparing NuMVC with state-of-the-art heuristic algorithms show that NuMVC is at least competitive with the nearest competitor namely PLS on the DIMACS benchmark, and clearly dominates all competitors on the BHOSLIB benchmark. Also, experimental results indicate that NuMVC finds an optimal solution much faster than the current best exact algorithm for Maximum Clique on random instances as well as some structured ones. Moreover, we study the effectiveness of the two strategies and the run-time behaviour through experimental analysis.

/pdf/numvc-an-efficient-local-search-algorithm-for-minimum-vertex-58qpf4g20r.pdf

NuMVC: an efficient local search algorithm for minimum vertex cover

The maximum satisfiability (MAX-SAT) problem, especially the weighted version, has extensive applications. Weighted MAX-SAT instances encoded from real-world applications may be very large, which calls for efficient approximate methods, mainlystochastic local search (SLS) ones. However, few works exist on SLS algorithms for weighted MAX-SAT. In this paper, we propose a new heuristic called CCM for weighted MAX-SAT. The CCM heuristic prefers to select a CCMP variable. By combining CCM withrandom walk, we design a simple SLS algorithm dubbed CCLS for weighted MAX-SAT. The CCLS algorithm is evaluated against a state-of-the-art SLS solver IRoTS and two state-of-the-art complete solvers namely akmaxsat_ls and New WPM2, on a broad range of weighted MAX-SAT instances. Experimental results illustrate that the quality of solution found by CCLS is much better than that found by IRoTS, akmaxsat_ls and New WPM2 on most industrial, crafted and random instances, indicating the efficiency and the robustness of the CCLS algorithm. Furthermore, CCLS is evaluated in the weighted and unweighted MAX-SAT tracks of incomplete solvers in the Eighth Max-SAT Evaluation (Max-SAT 2013), and wins four tracks in this evaluation, illustrating that the performance of CCLS exceeds the current state-of-the-art performance of SLS algorithms on solving MAX-SAT instances.

CCLS: An Efficient Local Search Algorithm for Weighted Maximum Satisfiability

The Maximum Weight Clique problem (MWCP) is an important generalization of the Maximum Clique problem with wide applications. This paper introduces two heuristics and develops two local search algorithms for MWCP. Firstly, we propose a heuristic called strong configuration checking (SCC), which is a new variant of a recent powerful strategy called configuration checking (CC) for reducing cycling in local search. Based on the SCC strategy, we develop a local search algorithm named LSCC. Moreover, to improve the performance on massive graphs, we apply a low-complexity heuristic called Best from Multiple Selection (BMS) to select the swapping vertex pair quickly and effectively. The BMS heuristic is used to improve LSCC, resulting in the LSCC+BMS algorithm. Experiments show that the proposed algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art local search algorithm MN/TS and its improved version MN/TS+BMS on the standard benchmarks namely DIMACS and BHOSLIB, as well as a wide range of real world massive graphs.

/pdf/two-efficient-local-search-algorithms-for-maximum-weight-100kzvi3o1.pdf

Two efficient local search algorithms for Maximum Weight Clique problem

The problem of finding a minimum vertex cover (MinVC) in a graph is a well known NP-hard problem with important applications. There has been much interest in developing heuristic algorithms for finding a "good" vertex cover in graphs. In practice, most heuristic algorithms for MinVC are based on the local search method. Previously, local search algorithms for MinVC have focused on solving academic benchmarks where the graphs are of relatively small size, and they are not suitable for solving massive graphs as they usually have highcomplexity heuristics. In this paper, we propose a simple and fast local search algorithm called FastVC for solving MinVC in massive graphs, which is based on two low-complexity heuristics. Experimental results on a broad range of real world massive graphs show that FastVC finds much better vertex covers (and thus also independent sets) than state of the art local search algorithms for MinVC.

/pdf/balance-between-complexity-and-quality-local-search-for-457ju1nt9b.pdf

Shaowei Cai

Papers

Local search with edge weighting and configuration checking heuristics for minimum vertex cover

NuMVC: an efficient local search algorithm for minimum vertex cover

CCLS: An Efficient Local Search Algorithm for Weighted Maximum Satisfiability

Two efficient local search algorithms for Maximum Weight Clique problem

Balance between complexity and quality: local search for minimum vertex cover in massive graphs