Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Incremental Timing-Driven Placement with Displacement Constraint

In the modern deep-submicron Very Large Integrated Circuit(VLSI) design flow interconnect delays are becoming major limiting factor for timing closure. Traditional placement algorithms such as routability-driven placement (improves routability) and wirelengthdriven placement (reduces total wirelength) are no longer sufficient to close timing. To this end, timing-driven placement plays a crucial role in reducing the interconnect delay through timing critical paths (paths with timing violations/negative slacks) of the design and thereby achieving specific performance/clock frequency. In the placement flow, timing information about the design can be incorporated during global placement and/or incremental/detailed placement. Although, over the years, there has been significant advances in the quality of the global placement, there is a growing need for high performance incremental timing-driven placement due to the lack of accurate interconnect information during global placement. Moreover, incremental timing-driven placement is essential to recover timing while preserving the other optimization objectives such as total wirelength, routing congestion, and so forth which are optimized at the early stages of the design flow. This thesis proposes a simple, yet efficient, incremental timing-driven placement algorithm that seeks to find optimized locations for standard cells so that the total negative slack of the design can be maximized. Our algorithm consists two stages: (1) Global Move which positions standard cells inside a critical bounding box to eliminate timing violations on timing critical nets; and (2) Local Move which provides further timing improvement by finely adjusting the current locations of the standard cells within a local region. We evaluate our algorithm using ICCAD-2014 timing-driven placement contest benchmarks. The results show that, on average, our technique eliminates 94% and 30% of the
EFFECT OF CAPITAL STRUCTURE ON FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE OF FIRMS LISTED ON THE RWANDA STOCK EXCHANGE

This study sought to appraise the effect of capital structure on financial performance of firms listed on RSE. Both primary and secondary data were used by the study. The study adopted descriptive research design and the population was all the six companies listed in the Rwanda Stock Exchange (RSE). A census survey was conducted on all the six listed firms and purposive sampling technique was used to sample the respondents to participate in the study. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and regression analysis using SPSS version 20. The study findings indicated that capital structure is negatively associated with ROA. Furthermore, capital structure is negatively associated with ROE. The regression results indicated that the relationship between capital structure and both ROA and ROE is negative and significant, Based on the study findings, the study concluded that, the association between capital structures and both ROA and ROE is negative and capital structure explains a larger change in ROA than in ROE. Furthermore, the relationship between capital structure and both ROA and ROE is negative and significant. Generally, the study concluded that capital structure is negatively and significantly related to financial performance of firms listed at the RSE.The study recommends that firms listed at the RSE should improve their capital structure and implement strategies that lead to a reduction in liquidity ratio as it leads to improved financial performance. The firms should keep its leverage level under control and have clear working capital management guidelines to avoid bankruptcy
From AlphaGo Zero to 2048

The game 2048 has gained a huge popularity in recent years [6]. The game allows the players to move numbers (a power of 2 such as 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.) on the screen to sum up to at least 2048. It is easy to learn to play since it has only 4 actions: up, down, left and right. However, it is very hard to obtain a number greater or equal to 2048 because each action you make at a current state will lead to hundreds of unpredictable results. In this paper, we present a similar algorithm used in AlphaGo Zero to the game 2048 with a unique rewardsand-punishments system in order to increase the self-study speed of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as well as to obtaining a higher score for the auto-play mode of AI. Furthermore, based on the results by the Minimax Algorithm with AlphaBeta Pruning, the Expectiminimax Algorithm and the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), we conclude that the Monte Carlo Tree Search outperforms other algorithms when applied to the game 2048. Finally, we show that AI with reinforcement learning [9] can beat the highest score that humans have achieved in the Game 2048. ACM Reference Format: Yulin ZHOU. 2019. From AlphaGo Zero to 2048. In The 1st Workshop on Deep Reinforcement Learning for Knowledge Discovery (DRL4KDD ’19), August 5, 2019, Anchorage, AK, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 7 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn.nnnnnnn
Financial Development and Innovation : Is There Evidence of a Schumpeterian Finance-Innovation Nexus ?

We study the effect of financial development on innovation for 51 countries between 1993 and 2008. Consistent with expectations from Schumpeterian models of finance, entrepreneurship and economic growth, we find that higher levels of financial development coincide with stronger innovative activity. We also study the role of banking crises in the finance-innovation nexus and do not find that banking crises matter. In sum, our findings suggests that financial intermediaries may indeed encourage investment in innovative entrepreneurial activity. Thus, economic policies that strengthen a country’s financial system may also improve its innovative capacity, which in turn promotes economic growth.
Now and then : Perspectives on positional variance in temporal demonstratives

Despite its reputation as an archetypal example of indexicality, the temporal adverb now has many non-indexical uses. It is not surprising, then, that recent work has instead focused on an intuition that now evokes some notion of change or contrast in the preceding discourse. We argue that this intuition should not be directly encoded in the semantics of now, but rather should be derived as a product of how its semantics interacts with information structure. Our argument is guided by a previously unnoticed contrast in its interpretation based on its position in the sentence. We propose that, in sentence-initial position, now is a contrastive topic, which contributes to the intuition that it “pushes forward” the narrative. Its true semantic shape is revealed in final position. This is, we propose, indexical, though not to the utterance time, but a more flexible assessment time. We extend our account of now to then, treating them as a proximal-distal pair of temporal demonstratives, identifying some similarities and some differences in how they are interpreted in a narrative.
Investigating the Impact of Organization on the Design of Complex Systems : A Framework based on the Dynamics of Information Flow

The objective of this research paper is to understand the fundamental dynamics between social and technical realms observed during the design of complex systems. We propose a decision support framework that accounts for the mechanisms and phenomena, which influence the flow of information in an organization, and understand how they affect the product design and performance. Prior literature documents the relationship between an organization’s structure and structure of the product that it develops. However, there is still a lack of fundamental understanding of how this relationship contributes to various organizational phenomena observed in the real world, and, how such a relationship can be leveraged to promote favorable design outcomes.We propose to address these gaps in the literature through modeling the information exchange mechansims within various types of organizational structures and investigating how these exchanges may drive design decisions and, in turn, the product performance. Our hypothesis is that by modeling the dynamics of information flow within an organization we can gain a fundamental understanding of the mechanisms through which organizations affect the product. An example based on a satellite design problem is used to illustrate our approach. The knowledge gained through this paper is envisioned to assist decision-makers by accounting for various impacts associated with organizational structures, resulting in improved complex system design choices.
WP ECON 14 . 05 Accounting for Spanish business cycles

We apply the business cycle methodology proposed by Chari, Kehoe, and McGrattan (2007) to identify the sources of Spanish business uctuations during two outstanding cyclical episodes: the recession alongside the transition to democracy in 1977 and the great recession of 2008. We nd that the labor wedge plays a key role during both recessions and that taxes and labor market institutions are likely behind the wedge movements. We conclude that any model that tries to understand the causes of recessions that occurred in the last three decades should focus on the labor wedge. Keywords: Business cycle accounting, e¢ ciency wedge, labor wedge, investment wedge JEL Classi cation: E32, O11, O41, O47, O53. Acknowledgements: For helpful comments we thank J.C. Conesa, C. Elgin, I. García, M. Hidalgo, J.F. Jimeno, E. McGrattan, M.J. Moral, J.P. Nicolini, J.M. OKean, J. Pérez, J.L. Torres, Y. Rebollo, V. Ríos-Rull, the associate editor, and two anonymous references. For their valuable guidance about scal and labor laws we thank María Jesús Cuevas (Agencia Estatal de la Administración Tributaria, AEAT) and Ricardo Monfort (Servicio Público de Empleo Estatal, SEPE). All remaining errors as well as the opinions expressed in the paper are the entire responsibility of the authors. We gratefully acknowledge nancial support from Proyecto Excelencia Junta de Andalucía P14-SEJ-1512 and P07-SEJ-02479. Ad-
The Acquisition of the English Plural Morpheme by L 1 Thai Learners : A Case of the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis

This paper examines the acquisition of the English plural morpheme ‘-s’ by L1 Thai learners. The study hypothesized that, in line with the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis (FFFH), whereby functional features unselected in learners’ L1 are not accessible in second language acquisition (Hawkins & Chan, 1997; Hawkins & Liszka, 2003), but not with the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH), whereby fucntional categories non-existent in learners’ L1 do not by necessity mean that learners cannot acquire these features since it is assumed that inappropriate L2 production is due to syntax-morphology mapping problems ardiere, 1 r vost & White, 2000), variable production of the English plural morpheme would occur, possibly due to impaired syntactic representation of the said feature in the native Thai language. Two groups of L1 Thai learners -high and low English proficiency groups -performed a grammaticality judgment task (GJT) and a cloze test. The results indicated that both proficiency groups displayed relatively low correct judgment and suppliance rates of the English plural marking, and that variable production of the English plural ‘-s’ was found across obligatory plural contexts. The findings indicated asymmetries of the plural morpheme use, i.e. the L2 learners supplied the English plural morpheme more particularly when some linguistic cues were present than when these cues did not exist. Overall, the results of both tasks confirmed the hypothesis, thus supporting the FFFH and confounding the MSIH. The findings contribute to the ongoing debate on L2 variability of functional morphology.
Multi-Modal Face Presentation Attack Detection via Spatial and Channel Attentions

Face presentation attack detection (PAD) has drawn increasing attentions to secure face recognition (FR) systems which are being widely used in many applications from access control to smartphone unlock. Traditional approaches for PAD may lack good generalization capability into new application scenarios due to the limited number of subjects and data modality. In this work, we propose an end-to-end multi-modal fusion approach via spatial and channel attention to improve PAD performance on CASIA-SURF. Specifically, We first build four branches integrated with spatial and channel attention module to obtain the uniform features of different modalities, i.e., RGB, Depth, IR and the fused modality with 9 channels which concatenating three modalities. Subsequently, the features extracted from the four branches are concatenated and fed into the shared layers to learn more discriminative features from the fusion perspective. Finally, we get the classification confidence scores w.r. t. PAD or not. The entire network is optimized with the joint of the center loss and softmax loss and SGRD solver to update the parameters. The proposed approach shows promising results on the CASIA-SURF dataset.
Multi-dialect Neural Machine Translation and Dialectometry

We present a multi-dialect neural machine translation (NMT) model tailored to Japanese. While the surface forms of Japanese dialects differ from those of standard Japanese, most of the dialects share fundamental properties such as word order, and some also use many of the same phonetic correspondence rules. To take advantage of these properties, we integrate multilingual, syllable-level, and ﬁxed-order translation techniques into a general NMT model. Our experimental results demonstrate that this model can outperform a baseline dialect translation model. In addition, we show that visualizing the dialect embed-dings learned by the model can facilitate geographical and typological analyses of dialects.
The experience of a heat wave and preparations for a hot future

As global temperatures rise, adverse health effects due to heat exposure are an increasingly pressing issue, particularly threatening to the health of elderly people. Mitigating these threats requires a dynamic climate adaptation system embedding a variety of measures. Ideally, such a system incorporates the coping strategies and experiences of the vulnerable themselves in a well-developed strategical work of municipalities. This study was performed in Trelleborg in the aftermath of the extraordinarily warm summer of 2018. The aim was to investigate the specific risk context of elderly and heat, in terms of how the municipality and its elderly population experience and manage such risks, both separately and in collaboration. Three focus group sessions with elderly individuals were conducted, as well as nine interviews with municipality officials. These were analysed alongside a number of official documents on the topic. The findings showed that the elderly’s primary concerns with regards to the heat is with regards to the threats to society at large, or to other elderly individuals, rather than to their own health, thus implying a need for awareness-raising measures. Nonetheless, the elderly’s lives were fundamentally altered during the summer of 2018. Coping strategies included alterations of circadian rhythm, food and drink intake, and movements, and were thus mostly behavioural. These coping strategies appear as unreflected rather than deliberate. The municipality has implemented response mechanisms, particularly aimed at the citizens within the elderly care system. Moreover, it has focused on the spreading of information on risks and possible counter-measures at the individual level. However, it fails to incorporate management of heat in the urban development. This thesis provides a discussion that extends into potential ways of enhancing the adaptational work of the municipality. Suggested improvements include implementation of ecosystembased adaptation, more focus on the suitable channels of information, as well as achieving what I refer to as heat-escape.
Buddhist Religious Practice and Social Competence of Thai Adolescents

Approximately 95% of Thais are Theravada Buddhists. This research was undertaken to assess the relation between Buddhist religious practice and social competence of adolescents in Bangkok. Participants were recruited from public middle and high schools in Bangkok; 239, age average 14.02 years. The correlations between the variables reported separately for public and temple school are discussed.
Which Banks Amplify Shocks ? 1 1

Using bank-level data for 8,477 banks in 129 countries for the 24-year period from 1992 to 2015, we ask whether competition among banks affects their ability to smooth or amplify shocks. The large variation in our data allows us to consider a vast array of economic conditions faced by individual banks across different countries over time. In particular, variation across the degree of competition faced by individual banks in different environments over time enables us to investigate their smoothing ability in relation to their market power. We find that the higher their market power the lower is the growth rate of lending relative to deposits. As a result, in periods of falling deposits, higher market power for the average bank would be associated with an even greater fall in lending and thus with an amplification of adverse shocks represented by deposit declines. Strikingly, at very high levels of market power there is a threshold past which the effect of market power on the growth rate of lending relative to deposits turns positive so that “superpower”banks contribute to smoothing of adverse effects of declining deposits and to amplification of positive shocks caused by a rise in deposits.
Commissioning the Linac Coherent Light Source injector

The Linac Coherent Light Source is a SASE x-ray free-electron laser (FEL) project presently under construction at SLAC [J. Arthur et al., SLAC-R-593, 2002. ]. The injector section, from drive laser and rf photocathode gun through first bunch compressor chicane, was installed in the fall of 2006. The initial system commissioning with an electron beam was completed in August of 2007, with the goal of a 1.2micron emittance in a 1-nC bunch demonstrated. The second phase of commissioning, including second bunch compressor and full linac, is planned for 2008, with FEL commissioning in 2009. We report experimental results and experience gained in the first phase of commissioning, including the photocathode drive laser, rf gun, photocathode, S-band and X-band rf systems, first bunch compressor, and the various beam diagnostics.
The Value of Joint Retirement of Married Couples

I estimate the value of joint retirement of elderly Danish households using a collective structural life cycle model of consumption and retirement. The model encompass non-separability between consumption and leisure and income uncertainty, correlated across spouses. I nd positive valuation of joint retirement of both males and females. Point estimates indicate that males tend to value joint retirement more than their female counterpart. To illustrate the importance of the value of joint retirement, I compare policy responses from changes in nancial incentives from the collective model with nested unitary models. Labor market responses predicted by the two groups of models diverge. The unitarian models seem to overestimate the policy responses.
Graph-based classification of intestinal glands in colorectal cancer tissue images

Pathologists study tissue morphology in order to correctly diagnose diseases such as colorectal cancer. This task can be very time consuming, and automated systems can greatly improve the precision and speed with which a diagnosis is established. Explainable algorithms and results are key to successful implementation of these methods into routine diagnostics in the medical field. In this paper, we propose a graphbased approach for intestinal gland classification. It leverages the high representational power of graphs for describing geometrical and topological properties of the glands. A novel, publicly available image and graph dataset is introduced based on cell segmentation of healthy and dysplastic H&E stained intestinal glands from pT1 colorectal cancer. The graphs are compared using an approximate graph edit distance and are classified using the k-nearest neighbours algorithm. With this method, we achieve a classification accuracy of 83.3%.
Influence of Social Cognitive Factors on Physical Activity among Breast Cancer

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc/3.0), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Korean Journal of Adult Nursing Vol. 31 No. 2, 211-218, April 2019 pISSN 1225-4886 / eISSN 2288-338X https://doi.org/10.7475/kjan.2019. 31.2. 211
Full Length Research Paper EFFECT OF BOILING AND ROASTING ON THE NUTRIENT AND ANTI-NUTRIENT CONTENTS IN CONOPHOR NUT FLOUR

In the current study, the effect of boiling and roasting conophor nuts on the nutrient and anti-nutrient contents in the flour was investigated. The proximate analysis showed that the flour from raw nut is rich in protein content (54.49%). Flours from the boiled nuts and roasted nuts contained lower protein, fat and ash contents, but higher crude fibre, carbohydrate and caloric value than their values in the flour from raw nut. Boiling and roasting of the nuts led to reductions in the Ca, Na, Mg, Fe and Zn contents in the conophor nut flour when compared with their values in the flour from raw nut. “Flour from roasted nuts had significantly (p<0.05) higher K and P contents than their values in the flours from raw and boiled nuts”. Boiling and roasting of the nuts significantly (p<0.05) reduced the levels of HCN, oxalate, phytate, tannins and trypsin inhibitor in the flour when compared with their values in the flour from raw nut. Boiling was more effective in the reduction of the anti-nutritional factors than roasting.
WP / 16 / 37 Sovereign Defaults , External Debt , and Real Exchange Rate Dynamics

Emerging countries experience real exchange rate depreciations around defaults. In this paper, we examine this observed pattern empirically and through the lens of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. The theoretical model explicitly incorporates bond issuances in local and foreign currencies, and endogenous determination of real exchange rate and default risk. Our quantitative analysis replicates the link between real exchange rate depreciation and default probability around defaults and moments of the real exchange rate that match the data. Prior to default, interactions of real exchange rate depreciation, originated from a sequence of low tradable goods shocks with the sovereign’s large share of foreign currency debt, trigger defaults. In post-default periods, the resulting output costs and loss of market access due to default lead to further real exchange rate depreciation. JEL Classification Numbers: E43; F32; F34; G12