Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Timing-Driven Placement

The placement algorithms presented in the previous chapters mostly focus on minimizing the total wirelength (TWL). Timing-driven placement (TDP) is designed specifically targeting wires on timing critical paths. It shall be noted that a cell is usually connected with two or more cells. Making some targeted nets shorter during placement may sacrifice the wirelengths of other nets that are connected through common cells. While the delay on critical paths decreases, other paths may become critical. Therefore, timing-driven placement has to be performed in a very careful and balanced manner. Timing-driven placement has been studied extensively over the last two decades. The drive for new methods in timing-driven placement to maximize circuit performance is from multiple facets due to the technology scaling and integration: (1) growing interconnect versus gate delay ratios, (2) higher levels of on-die functional integration which makes global interconnects even longer, (3) increasing chip operating frequencies which make timing closure tough, (4) increasing number of macros and standard cells for modern system-on-chip (SOC) designs. These factors create continuing challenges to better timing-driven placement Timing-driven placement can be performed at both global and detailed placement stages (see previous chapters on placement). Historically, timing-driven placement algorithms can be roughly grouped into two classes: net-based and path-based. The net-based approach deals with nets only, with the hope that if we handle the nets on the critical paths well, the entire critical path delay may be optimized implicitly. The two basic techniques for net-based optimization are through net weighting [17, 5, 37, 50] and net constraints [22] [63] [55] [48] [24] [29]. The path-based approach directly works on all or a subset of paths [31, 59, 61, 11]. The majority path-based approaches formulate the problem into a mathematical programming framework (e.g., linear programming). There are pros and cons for both net and path based approaches in terms of runtime/scalability, ease of implementation, controllability, and so on. Modern timing driven placement techniques tend to use some hybrid manner of both net-based and path-based approaches [39]. In this chapter, we will discuss fundamental algorithms as well as recent trends of timing-driven placement. Due to the large amount of works in timing-driven placement, it is not possible to exhaust all of them in this chapter. Instead, we will describe the basic ideas and fundamental techniques, and point out recent researches and possible future directions. We will first cover the basic building blocks for timing driven placement. Then the next two sections will discuss net-based approaches, i.e., through net weighting and net constraints. Then we will survey the basic formulations and algorithms behind the path (or timing graph) based approach. Additional techniques and issues in the context of timing driven placement will be discussed, followed by conclusions.
West Nile Virus T-Cell Ligand Sequences Shared with Other Flaviviruses: a Multitude of Variant Sequences as Potential Altered Peptide Ligands

ABSTRACT Phylogenetic relatedness and cocirculation of several major human pathogen flaviviruses are recognized as a possible cause of deleterious immune responses to mixed infection or immunization and call for a greater understanding of the inter-Flavivirus protein homologies. This study focused on the identification of human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-restricted West Nile virus (WNV) T-cell ligands and characterization of their distribution in reported sequence data of WNV and other flaviviruses. H-2-deficient mice transgenic for either A2, A24, B7, DR2, DR3, or DR4 HLA alleles were immunized with overlapping peptides of the WNV proteome, and peptide-specific T-cell activation was measured by gamma interferon (IFN-γ) enzyme-linked immunosorbent spot (ELISpot) assays. Approximately 30% (137) of the WNV proteome peptides were identified as HLA-restricted T-cell ligands. The majority of these ligands were conserved in ∼≥88% of analyzed WNV sequences. Notably, only 51 were WNV specific, and the remaining 86, chiefly of E, NS3, and NS5, shared an identity of nine or more consecutive amino acids with sequences of 64 other flaviviruses, including several major human pathogens. Many of the shared ligands had an incidence of >50% in the analyzed sequences of one or more of six major flaviviruses. The multitude of WNV sequences shared with other flaviviruses as interspecies variants highlights the possible hazard of defective T-cell activation by altered peptide ligands in the event of dual exposure to WNV and other flaviviruses, by either infection or immunization. The data suggest the possible preferred use of sequences that are pathogen specific with minimum interspecies sequence homology for the design of Flavivirus vaccines.
Probabilistic co-adaptive brain–computer interfacing

Objective. Brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) are confronted with two fundamental challenges: (a) the uncertainty associated with decoding noisy brain signals, and (b) the need for co-adaptation between the brain and the interface so as to cooperatively achieve a common goal in a task. We seek to mitigate these challenges. Approach. We introduce a new approach to brain–computer interfacing based on partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). POMDPs provide a principled approach to handling uncertainty and achieving co-adaptation in the following manner: (1) Bayesian inference is used to compute posterior probability distributions (‘beliefs’) over brain and environment state, and (2) actions are selected based on entire belief distributions in order to maximize total expected reward; by employing methods from reinforcement learning, the POMDP’s reward function can be updated over time to allow for co-adaptive behaviour. Main results. We illustrate our approach using a simple non-invasive BCI which optimizes the speed–accuracy trade-off for individual subjects based on the signal-to-noise characteristics of their brain signals. We additionally demonstrate that the POMDP BCI can automatically detect changes in the user’s control strategy and can co-adaptively switch control strategies on-the-fly to maximize expected reward. Significance. Our results suggest that the framework of POMDPs offers a promising approach for designing BCIs that can handle uncertainty in neural signals and co-adapt with the user on an ongoing basis. The fact that the POMDP BCI maintains a probability distribution over the user’s brain state allows a much more powerful form of decision making than traditional BCI approaches, which have typically been based on the output of classifiers or regression techniques. Furthermore, the co-adaptation of the system allows the BCI to make online improvements to its behaviour, adjusting itself automatically to the user’s changing circumstances.
Value of high-sensitivity C-reactive protein assays in predicting atrial fibrillation recurrence: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Objectives We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of studies on high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) assays to see whether these tests are predictive of atrial fibrillation (AF) recurrence after cardioversion. Design Systematic review and meta-analysis. Data sources PubMed, EMBASE and Cochrane databases as well as a hand search of the reference lists in the retrieved articles from inception to December 2013. Study eligibility criteria This review selected observational studies in which the measurements of serum CRP were used to predict AF recurrence. An hs-CRP assay was defined as any CRP test capable of measuring serum CRP to below 0.6 mg/dL. Primary and secondary outcome measures We summarised test performance characteristics with the use of forest plots, hierarchical summary receiver operating characteristic curves and bivariate random effects models. Meta-regression analysis was performed to explore the source of heterogeneity. Results We included nine qualifying studies comprising a total of 347 patients with AF recurrence and 335 controls. A CRP level higher than the optimal cut-off point was an independent predictor of AF recurrence after cardioversion (summary adjusted OR: 3.33; 95% CI 2.10 to 5.28). The estimated pooled sensitivity and specificity for hs-CRP was 71.0% (95% CI 63% to 78%) and 72.0% (61% to 81%), respectively. Most studies used a CRP cut-off point of 1.9 mg/L to predict long-term AF recurrence (77% sensitivity, 65% specificity), and 3 mg/L to predict short-term AF recurrence (73% sensitivity, 71% specificity). Conclusions hs-CRP assays are moderately accurate in predicting AF recurrence after successful cardioversion.
Exploratory Search on the Mobile Web

We present a mobile touchable application for online topic graph extraction and exploration of web content. The system has been implemented for operation on a tablet computer, i.e. an Apple iPad, and on a mobile device, i.e. Apple iPhone or iPod touch. The topics are extracted from web snippets which are determined by a standard search engine. We consider the extraction of topics as a specific empirical collocation extraction task where collocations are extracted between chunks combined with the cluster descriptions of an online clustering algorithm. Our measure of association strength is based on the pointwise mutual information between chunk pairs which explicitly takes their distance into account. These syntactically–oriented chunk pairs are then semantically ranked and filtered using the cluster descriptions. An initial user evaluation shows that this system is especially helpful for finding new interesting information on topics about which the user has only a vague idea or even no idea at all.
The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA): an immeasurable source of knowledge

The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) is a public funded project that aims to catalogue and discover major cancer-causing genomic alterations to create a comprehensive “atlas” of cancer genomic profiles. So far, TCGA researchers have analysed large cohorts of over 30 human tumours through large-scale genome sequencing and integrated multi-dimensional analyses. Studies of individual cancer types, as well as comprehensive pan-cancer analyses have extended current knowledge of tumorigenesis. A major goal of the project was to provide publicly available datasets to help improve diagnostic methods, treatment standards, and finally to prevent cancer. This review discusses the current status of TCGA Research Network structure, purpose, and achievements.
VLR Group Signatures with Indisputable Exculpability and Efficient Revocation

Group signatures have been studied for nearly two decades and have wide applications, such as anonymous authentication and trusted computing. In 2004 Boneh and Shacham first formalized the concept of a group signature scheme with Verifier-Local Revocation (VLR) in which the revocation list is distributed only to the verifiers. This is an interesting revocation model as the signers are not involved in the revocation check and are transparent to the revocation process. Most of the existing VLR group signature schemes including the Boneh and Shacham's original one do not satisfy exculpability without fully trusted issuer or largely increasing cost. In this paper, we propose a modification to the Boneh and Shacham VLR group signature definition by adding a dispute process to achieve exculpability. We propose a concrete VLR group signature scheme under this new definition. Our scheme is more efficient than previous VLR group signatures schemes, and only takes one exponentiation per revocation check whereas the existing VLR group signature schemes require at least one bilinear map operation per revocation check. Security of our scheme is based on the strong Diffie-Hellman assumption and the decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption in the random oracle model.
Death and Personal Faith: A Psychometric Investigation

Studies on religion and death have usually treated both domains in llnidimensional terms, but our theory suggests different forms of personal religion are related to different aspects of death perspectives. To assess these hypothese Intrinsic-Committed and Extrinsic-Consensual religious expressions were related to a set of newly developed death perspective instruments. The hypotheses gained substantial support with Intrinsic-Committed faith associating positively with viewing death in terms of an Afterlife of Reward and as Courage and negatively with a variety of undesirable death views. In contrast, Extrinsic-Consensual faith correlates with views of death as Loneliness-Pain, Indifference, Unknown, Forsaking Dependents, and Natural End.
The role of tumor-associated macrophages in the delivery of liposomal doxorubicin to solid murine fibrosarcoma tumors.

Murine fibrosarcoma tumors arising from subcutaneous inoculation of FSa-N cells exhibit 4-fold higher tumor-associated macrophage (TAM) levels than those from the FSa-R line. These solid tumors were used to assess the role of TAMs in the accumulation of liposomal anticancer drugs. Two liposomal formulations of doxorubicin were investigated: a conventional formulation composed of distearoylphosphatidylcholine (DSPC) and cholesterol and a sterically stabilized liposomal formulation composed of DSPC/cholesterol/poly (ethylene glycol)-modified distearoylphosphatidyethanolamine (PEG-PE). Circulating concentrations of PEG-PE containing liposomes 24 h after i.v. administration were 3-fold greater than those observed after administration of conventional liposomes. No differences were observed in drug retention or tumor (FSa-R or FSa-N) drug and liposomal lipid delivery when comparisons were made between different liposomal formulations. However, tumor doxorubicin concentrations were increased as much as 4-fold for liposomal formulations relative to free drug. Further, there was a 1.5- to 2-fold increase in doxorubicin delivery to TAM-enriched FSa-N tumors compared with FSa-R tumors. Fluorescence microscopy studies revealed a poor correlation between CD11b (Mac-1) positive cells (TAMs) and the appearance of doxorubicin fluorescence. These results suggest that uptake of liposomal drugs by TAMs does not account for the enhanced accumulation of liposomal drugs in solid tumors. Rather, the increased tumor drug delivery may be related to alternative TAM-mediated processes that increase tumor vascular permeability. Therapeutic studies demonstrated that increased tumor drug uptake observed for the liposomal doxorubicin formulations led to marginal improvements in antitumor activity, and it is suggested that much of the drug delivered in liposomal form is not biologically available.
A planar ultrawideband antenna with multiple controllable band notches for UWB cognitive radio applications

A planar antenna for employment in overlay and underlay ultra-wideband cognitive radio is presented in this paper. The antenna can be operated as ultra-wideband, for underlay CR and for sensing in the overlay CR. When used in the overlay CR mode, the proposed antenna can selectively have one, two or three notches in the WLAN, WiMAX, and U-NII bands, to prevent interference to primary users operating in these bands. The band notches are induced using split-ring resonators (SRRs) and complementary split-ring resonators (CSSRs), and are controlled using electronic switches mounted over the SRRs and the CSRRs.
Post-Newtonian Approximation for Spinning Particles

Using an energy-momentum tensor for spinning particles due to Dixon and Bailey-Israel, we develop the post-Newtonian approximation for N spinning particles in a self-contained manner. The equations of motion are derived directly from this energy-momentum tensor. Following the formalism of Epstein and Wagoner, we also obtain the waveform and the luminosity of the gravitational wave generated by these particles. Typeset using REVTEX ∗htcho@mail.tku. edu.tw 1
Further problems with projectivism

From David Hume onwards, many philosophers have argued that moral thinking is characterised by a tendency to ‘project’ our own mental states onto the world. This metaphor of projection may be understood as involving two empirical claims: the claim that humans experience morality as a realm of objective facts (the experiential hypothesis), and the claim that this moral experience is immediately caused by affective attitudes (the causal hypothesis). Elsewhere I argue in detail against one form of the experiential hypothesis. My main aim in this paper is to show that, considering recent psychological studies about folk metaethics and the relation between moral judgements and emotions, the causal hypothesis must be considered problematic too. First, the most common argument in favour of the causal hypothesis is based on an implausible premise and a dubious assumption. Second, ordinary people's moral experience is influenced by a non-affective factor, namely their openness to divergent moral views. And third, projectivism in general and its causal hypothesis in particular might not even hold true for affective moral judgements. This negative assessment of projectivism is significant both for our understanding of moral cognition as an empirical phenomenon and for metaethics.
Voltage sag and unbalance mitigation in distribution systems using multi-level UPQC

Unified Power Quality Conditioner (UPQC) is a series-parallel element in the Flexible AC Transmission System (FACTS) family. In this paper, a UPQC with cascaded multilevel inverter is proposed. Voltage sag, unbalance and load power factor in distribution system is mitigated using proposed multilevel UPQC. There is no need of using transformer and filter when multilevel UPQC is applied and it is one of its advantages. SPWM (Sinusoidal Natural Pulse Width Modulation) scheme is used for pulse generation to control multilevel inverters. The results showed the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Combining global and local features for food identification in dietary assessment

Many chronic diseases, such as heart diseases, diabetes, and obesity, can be related to diet. Hence, the need to accurately measure diet becomes imperative. We are developing methods to use image analysis tools for the identification and quantification of food consumed at a meal. In this paper we describe a new approach to food identification using several features based on local and global measures and a “voting” based late decision fusion classifier to identify the food items. Experimental results on a wide variety of food items are presented.
Autonomic Test by EZSCAN in the Screening for Prediabetes and Diabetes

Background Autonomic neuropathy is common in diabetics and may occur in prediabetes. A new and noninvasive autonomic test-EZSCAN evaluates sudomotor function precisely. No generally accepted EZSCAN thresholds to screen for prediabetes and diabetes have been defined. Methodology and Principal Findings Cross-sectional study of 5, 824 Chinese adults aged 40 and older was conducted in Shanghai, China. We used EZSCAN to evaluate autonomic function in different glucose status and screen for prediabetes and diabetes. The prevalence of prediabetes and diabetes were 21.9% and 17.5% respectively. Compared with the lowest quintile, the highest quintile of EZSCAN value had odds ratios for having dysglycemia (prediabetes or diabetes) of 2.08 (95% CI 1.67–2.58) in total population, 2.89 (95% CI 2.06–4.05) in men and 1.70 (95% CI 1.28–2.25) in women after adjustment for confounding factors. EZSCAN value improved the areas under ROC curve for detection of dysglycemia or diabetes beyond the contribution of conventional risk factors by 0.8% and 12.9%. The cut-off point of EZSCAN value higher than 30% provided reasonable sensitivities (70.3–83.7%) to detect dysglycemia not only in total population regardless of sex but also in individuals with high risk of developing diabetes. Conclusions and Significance EZSCAN value higher than 30% indicate an increased risk of prevalent prediabetes and diabetes, suggesting that subjects with EZSCAN ≥30% should be further evaluated by oral glucose tolerance test. The improvement of EZSCAN for diabetes detection was still of limited clinical relevance. Thus the clinical application value of EZSCAN is needed to be explored in future studies.
Growth in Oral Reading Fluency of Spanish ELL Students With Learning Disabilities

The process of learning to read is difficult for many children, and this is especially true for students with learning disabilities (LD). Reading in English becomes even more difficult when a student’s home language is not English. For English language learner (ELL) students with LD, acquiring the necessary skills to read fluently is an even greater challenge. The process of repeated reading has been beneficial for many students with LD, yet there is little information regarding its effect on ELL students. This column discusses the use of a fluency-based reading intervention with elementary-level, Spanish-speaking ELL students with specific LD.
Unstructured Tree Search on SIMD Parallel Computers

In this paper, we present new methods for load balancing of unstructured tree computations on largescale SIMD machines, and analyze the scalability of these and other existing schemes. An efficient formulation of tree search on a SIMD machine comprises of two major components: (i) a triggering mechanism, which determines when the search space redistribution must occur to balance search space over processors; and (ii) a scheme to redistribute the search space. We have devised a new redistribution mechanism and a new triggering mechanism. Either of these can be used in conjunction with triggering and redistribution mechanisms developed by other researchers. We analyze the scalability of these mechanisms, and verify the results experimentally. The analysis and experiments show that our new load balancing methods are highly scalable on SIMD architectures. Their scalability is shown to be no worse than that of the best load balancing schemes on MIMD architectures. We verify our theoretical results by implementing the 15-puzzle problem on a CM-21 SIMD parallel computer.
Surfactant protein D in serum from patients with allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis

Surfactant protein D (SP‐D) interacts with Aspergillus fumigatus and is strongly increased in the lavage from animals with acute allergic reactions to the fungus, suggesting a central role for SP‐D. As the course of cystic fibrosis (CF) is often complicated by an allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis (ABPA), the authors hypothesised that SP‐D may also be increased in serum during an ABPA, potentially assisting in its diagnosis and follow-up. In 22 patients with CF (11 with ABPA, 11 matched without ABPA) and 19 control patients without a pulmonary disease, SP‐D concentrations in serum were assessed by an enzyme immunoassay. Serum SP‐D in CF patients (130±16 ng·mL−1 (mean±sem)) was significantly higher than in the controls without lung disease (66±8 ng·mL−1). During the whole ABPA‐episode, SP‐D level did not change significantly, despite large changes of total serum immunoglobulin E. There was a clear negative correlation between SP‐D concentration and overall lung function, i.e. forced expiratory volume in one second and forced vital capacity. Serum level of surfactant protein D may be of value to follow pulmonary function and lung injury in cystic fibrosis patients. Surfactant protein D serum levels are not helpful for the diagnosis and follow-up of an allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis episode, contrary to what was expected from animal experiments.