Disorder and interfaces in proteins are two sides of the same coin

The importance of unstructured biology has quickly grown during the last decades accompanying the explosion of the number of experimentally resolved structures. The idea that structural disorder might be a novel mechanism of protein interaction is widespread in the literature, although the number of statistically significant structural studies supporting this idea is surprisingly low. In this work, through a large-scale-analysis of all the crystallographic structures of the Protein Data Bank averaged over clusters of homologous sequences, we show clear evidences that both the (experimentally verified) interaction interfaces and the disordered regions are involving roughly the same amino-acids of the protein. And beyond, disordered regions appear to carry information about the location of alternative interfaces when the protein lies within complexes, thus playing an important role in determining the order of assembly of protein complexes.

A Wearable Interface for Intuitive Control of Robotic Manipulators Without User Training

This paper describes the development of a wearable interface that exploits the user’s natural arm movements to intuitively control a robotic manipulator. The design is intended to alleviate the time and effort spent in operating the robotic manipulator, regardless of the age and technological experience of the user. The interface is made to be low-cost, comfortably worn, and easy to put on and remove. Kinematic models of human and robot arms are used to produce a natural mapping from the user’s arm movements to the commanded movements of the robotic manipulator. An experiment is conducted with 30 participants of varied ages and experience to assess the usability of the wearable interface. Each of the participants is assigned to perform a pick and place task using two of three different interfaces (the wearable interface, a game controller, and a mobile interface running on a tablet computer) for a total of 60 trials. The results of the study show that the wearable interface is easier to learn compared to the alternative interfaces and is chosen as the preferred interface by the participants. Performance data shows that the users complete the pick and place task faster with the wearable interface than with the alternative interfaces.

Map-Based User Interfaces for Music Information Retrieval

In this chapter, we introduce alternative ways to access digital audio collections. We give an overview of existing applications based on tow-dimensional, map-like representations of music collections. Further, we explain two applications for accessing audio files that are based on the Self-Organising Map, an unsupervised neural network model. These two applications—PlaySOM and PocketSOM—will be explained in greater detail, paying special attention to their unique properties and implementations for several mobile devices. These examples are supposed to gain the readers’ interest for alternative interfaces to large audio collections. Besides, we hope to show that alternative interfaces are feasible for both desktop computers and mobile devices and offer a practical approach to pressing issues in accessing digital collections.