Motivation: Network alignment (NA) aims to find similar (conserved) regions between networks, such as cellular networks of different species. Until recently, existing methods were limited to aligning static networks. However, real-world systems, including cellular functioning, are dynamic. Hence, in our previous work, we introduced the first ever dynamic NA method, DynaMAGNA++, which improved upon the traditional static NA. However, DynaMAGNA++ does not necessarily scale well to larger networks in terms of alignment quality or runtime. Results: To address this, we introduce a new dynamic NA approach, DynaWAVE. We show that DynaWAVE complements DynaMAGNA++: while DynaMAGNA++ is more accurate yet slower than DynaWAVE for smaller networks, DynaWAVE is both more accurate and faster than DynaMAGNA++ for larger networks. We provide a friendly user interface and source code for DynaWAVE. Availability and implementation: https://www.nd.edu/∼cone/DynaWAVE/. Contact: [email protected]. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Bioinformatics (2017) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btx841 The author of the above paper wishes to inform readers that the link provided in the Abstract for Availability and implementation was incorrect. The correct link is: https://www.nd.edu/∼cone/DynaWAVE/. The paper has now been corrected online.

Network alignment (NA) aims to find a node mapping that identifies topologically or functionally similar network regions between molecular networks of different species. Analogous to genomic sequence alignment, NA can be used to transfer biological knowledge from well- to poorly-studied species between aligned network regions. Pairwise NA (PNA) finds similar regions between two networks while multiple NA (MNA) can align more than two networks. We focus on MNA. Existing MNA methods aim to maximize total similarity over all aligned nodes (node conservation). Then, they evaluate alignment quality by measuring the amount of conserved edges, but only after the alignment is constructed. Directly optimizing edge conservation during alignment construction in addition to node conservation may result in superior alignments. Thus, we present a novel MNA method called multiMAGNA++ that can achieve this. Indeed, multiMAGNA++ outperforms or is on par with existing MNA methods, while often completing faster than existing methods. That is, multiMAGNA++ scales well to larger network data and can be parallelized effectively. During method evaluation, we also introduce new MNA quality measures to allow for more fair MNA method comparison compared to the existing alignment quality measures. The multiMAGNA++ code is available on the method's web page at http://nd.edu/~cone/multiMAGNA++/.

MOTIVATION: Network alignment (NA) aims to find a node mapping that conserves similar regions between compared networks. NA is applicable to many fields, including computational biology, where NA can guide the transfer of biological knowledge from well- to poorly-studied species across aligned network regions. Existing NA methods can only align static networks. However, most complex real-world systems evolve over time and should thus be modeled as dynamic networks. We hypothesize that aligning dynamic network representations of evolving systems will produce superior alignments compared to aligning the systems' static network representations, as is currently done. RESULTS: For this purpose, we introduce the first ever dynamic NA method, DynaMAGNA ++. This proof-of-concept dynamic NA method is an extension of a state-of-the-art static NA method, MAGNA++. Even though both MAGNA++ and DynaMAGNA++ optimize edge as well as node conservation across the aligned networks, MAGNA++ conserves static edges and similarity between static node neighborhoods, while DynaMAGNA++ conserves dynamic edges (events) and similarity between evolving node neighborhoods. For this purpose, we introduce the first ever measure of dynamic edge conservation and rely on our recent measure of dynamic node conservation. Importantly, the two dynamic conservation measures can be optimized with any state-of-the-art NA method and not just MAGNA++. We confirm our hypothesis that dynamic NA is superior to static NA, on synthetic and real-world networks, in computational biology and social domains. DynaMAGNA++ is parallelized and has a user-friendly graphical interface. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: http://nd.edu/∼cone/DynaMAGNA++/ . CONTACT: [email protected]. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

MOTIVATION: Network alignment aims to find conserved regions between different networks. Existing methods aim to maximize total similarity over all aligned nodes (i.e. node conservation). Then, they evaluate alignment quality by measuring the amount of conserved edges, but only after the alignment is constructed. Thus, we recently introduced MAGNA (Maximizing Accuracy in Global Network Alignment) to directly maximize edge conservation while producing alignments and showed its superiority over the existing methods. Here, we extend the original MAGNA with several important algorithmic advances into a new MAGNA++ framework. RESULTS: MAGNA++ introduces several novelties: (i) it simultaneously maximizes any one of three different measures of edge conservation (including our recent superior [Formula: see text] measure) and any desired node conservation measure, which further improves alignment quality compared with maximizing only node conservation or only edge conservation; (ii) it speeds up the original MAGNA algorithm by parallelizing it to automatically use all available resources, as well as by reimplementing the edge conservation measures more efficiently; (iii) it provides a friendly graphical user interface for easy use by domain (e.g. biological) scientists; and (iv) at the same time, MAGNA++ offers source code for easy extensibility by computational scientists. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: http://www.nd.edu/∼cone/MAGNA++/

Existing 3D face recognition algorithms have achieved high enough performances against public datasets like FRGC v2, that it is difficult to achieve further significant increases in recognition performance. However, the 3D TEC dataset is a more challenging dataset which consists of 3D scans of 107 pairs of twins that were acquired in a single session, with each subject having a scan of a neutral expression and a smiling expression. The combination of factors related to the facial similarity of identical twins and the variation in facial expression makes this a challenging dataset. We conduct experiments using state of the art face recognition algorithms and present the results. Our results indicate that 3D face recognition of identical twins in the presence of varying facial expressions is far from a solved problem, but that good performance is possible.