60 years of OR in Slovenia: development from a first conference to a vibrant community.

The paper provides a short history of the operations research (OR) in Slovenia. Some major events and achievements are mentioned and briefly discussed. The period starts in the year 1964, with the first symposium on OR in Slovenia. In the following decades, there were several important milestones: (1) the start of master's and Ph.D. studies in OR in 1974, (2) the establishment of SSI-SSOR in 1992 (SSI-SSOR stands for the Slovenian Section for Operational Research within the Slovenian Society of Informatics), and (3) the start of a series of symposia in operations research in 1993. All these activities resulted in an extensive list of publications, projects, and monographs and international connections, proving that OR is still a vibrant field, which facilitates knowledge transfer from pure research to business applications.

Collective dynamics of phase-repulsive oscillators solves graph coloring problem.

We show how to couple phase-oscillators on a graph so that collective dynamics "searches" for the coloring of that graph as it relaxes toward the dynamical equilibrium. This translates a combinatorial optimization problem (graph coloring) into a functional optimization problem (finding and evaluating the global minimum of dynamical non-equilibrium potential, done by the natural system's evolution). Using a sample of graphs, we show that our method can serve as a viable alternative to the traditional combinatorial algorithms. Moreover, we show that, with the same computational cost, our method efficiently solves the harder problem of improper coloring of weighed graphs.

Author Correction: Towards a data-integrated cell.

The original version of this Article contained an error in the spelling of the author Harry Hemingway, which was incorrectly given as Harry Hemmingway. This has been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article.

Towards a data-integrated cell.

We are increasingly accumulating molecular data about a cell. The challenge is how to integrate them within a unified conceptual and computational framework enabling new discoveries. Hence, we propose a novel, data-driven concept of an integrated cell, iCell. Also, we introduce a computational prototype of an iCell, which integrates three omics, tissue-specific molecular interaction network types. We construct iCells of four cancers and the corresponding tissue controls and identify the most rewired genes in cancer. Many of them are of unknown function and cannot be identified as different in cancer in any specific molecular network. We biologically validate that they have a role in cancer by knockdown experiments followed by cell viability assays. We find additional support through Kaplan-Meier survival curves of thousands of patients. Finally, we extend this analysis to uncover pan-cancer genes. Our methodology is universal and enables integrative comparisons of diverse omics data over cells and tissues.

Community structure and the evolution of interdisciplinarity in Slovenia's scientific collaboration network.

Interaction among the scientific disciplines is of vital importance in modern science. Focusing on the case of Slovenia, we study the dynamics of interdisciplinary sciences from 1960 to 2010. Our approach relies on quantifying the interdisciplinarity of research communities detected in the coauthorship network of Slovenian scientists over time. Examining the evolution of the community structure, we find that the frequency of interdisciplinary research is only proportional with the overall growth of the network. Although marginal improvements in favor of interdisciplinarity are inferable during the 70s and 80s, the overall trends during the past 20 years are constant and indicative of stalemate. We conclude that the flow of knowledge between different fields of research in Slovenia is in need of further stimulation.