ComplexContact (http://raptorx2.uchicago.edu/ComplexContact/) is a web server for sequence-based interfacial residue-residue contact prediction of a putative protein complex. Interfacial residue-residue contacts are critical for understanding how proteins form complex and interact at residue level. When receiving a pair of protein sequences, ComplexContact first searches for their sequence homologs and builds two paired multiple sequence alignments (MSA), then it applies co-evolution analysis and a CASP-winning deep learning (DL) method to predict interfacial contacts from paired MSAs and visualizes the prediction as an image. The DL method was originally developed for intra-protein contact prediction and performed the best in CASP12. Our large-scale experimental test further shows that ComplexContact greatly outperforms pure co-evolution methods for inter-protein contact prediction, regardless of the species.

Based on a bio-heuristic algorithm, this paper proposes a novel path planner called obstacle avoidance beetle antennae search (OABAS) algorithm, which is applied to the global path planning of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Compared with the previous bio-heuristic algorithms, the algorithm proposed in this paper has advantages of a wide search range and breakneck search speed, which resolves the contradictory requirements of the high computational complexity of the bio-heuristic algorithm and real-time path planning of UAVs. Besides, the constraints used by the proposed algorithm satisfy various characteristics of the path, such as shorter path length, maximum allowed turning angle, and obstacle avoidance. Ignoring the z-axis optimization by combining with the minimum threat surface (MTS), the resultant path meets the requirements of efficiency and safety. The effectiveness of the algorithm is substantiated by applying the proposed path planning algorithm on the UAVs. Moreover, comparisons with other existing algorithms further demonstrate the superiority of the proposed OABAS algorithm.

Mobile robots are becoming more and more widely used in industry and life, so the navigation of robots in dynamic environments has become an urgent problem to be solved. Dynamic path planning has, therefore, received more attention. This paper proposes a real-time dynamic path planning method for mobile robots that can avoid both static and dynamic obstacles. The proposed intelligent optimization method can not only get a better path but also has outstanding advantages in planning time. The algorithm used in the proposed method is a hybrid algorithm based on the beetle antennae search (BAS) algorithm and the artificial potential field (APF) algorithm, termed the BAS-APF method. By establishing a potential field, the convergence speed is accelerated, and the defect that the APF is easily trapped in the local minimum value is also avoided. At the same time, by setting a security scope to make the path closer to the available path in the real environment, the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method are verified through simulative results.

Due to the existence of time-varying chaotic disturbances in complex applications, the chaotic synchronization of sensor systems becomes a tough issue in industry electronics fields. To accelerate the synchronization process of chaotic sensor systems, this paper proposes a super-exponential-zeroing neurodynamic (SEZN) approach and its associated controller. Unlike the conventional zeroing neurodynamic (CZN) approach with exponential convergence property, the controller designed by the proposed SEZN approach inherently possesses the advantage of super-exponential convergence property, which makes the synchronization process faster and more accurate. Theoretical analyses on the stability and convergence advantages in terms of both faster convergence speed and lower error bound within the task duration are rigorously presented. Moreover, three synchronization examples substantiate the validity of the SEZN approach and the related controller for synchronization of chaotic sensor systems. Comparisons with other approaches such as the CZN approach, show the convergence superiority of the proposed SEZN approach. Finally, extensive tests further investigate the impact on convergence performance by choosing different values of design parameter and initial state.

As cancer remains one of the main threats of human life, developing efficient cancer treatments is urgent. Anticancer peptides, which could overcome the significant side effects and poor results of traditional cancer treatments, have become a new potential alternative these years. However, identifying anticancer peptides by experimental methods is time consuming and resource consuming, it is of great significance to develop effective computational tools to quickly and accurately identify potential anticancer peptides from amino acid sequences. For most current computational methods, feature representation plays a key role in their final successes. This study proposes a novel fast and accurate approach to identify anticancer peptides using diversified feature representations and ensemble learning method. For the feature representations, the information is encoded from multidimensional feature spaces, including sequence composition, sequence-order, physicochemical properties, etc. In order to better model the potential relationships of peptides, multiple ensemble classifiers, LightGBMs, are applied to detect the different feature sets at first. Then the obtained multiple outputs are used as inputs of the support vector machine classifier, which effectively identifies anticancer peptides. Experimental results on cross validation and independent test sets demonstrate that our method can achieve better or comparable performances compared with other state-of-the-art methods.

Task scheduling is critical for improving system performance in the distributed heterogeneous computing environment. The Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) tasks scheduling problem is NP-complete and it is hard to find an optimal schedule. Due to its key importance, the DAG tasks scheduling problem has been extensively studied in the literature. However, many previously proposed traditional heuristic algorithms are usually based on greedy methods and also lack the consideration of scheduling tasks between trusted and untrusted entities, which makes the problem more complicated, but there still exists a large optimization space to be explored. In this paper, we propose a trust-aware adaptive DAG tasks scheduling algorithm using the reinforcement learning and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) methods. The scheduling problem is defined using the reinforcement learning model. Efficient scheduling state space, action space and reward function are designed to train the policy gradient-based REINFORCE agent. The MCTS method is proposed to determine actual scheduling policies when DAG tasks are simultaneously executed in trusted and untrusted entities. Leveraging the algorithm’s capability of exploring long term reward, the proposed algorithm could achieve good scheduling policies while guaranteeing trusted tasks scheduled within trusted entities. Experimental results showed the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm compared with the classic HEFT/CPOP algorithms.