Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fault Tolerance in FPGA Architecture Using Hardware Controller - A Design Approach

With advancement in process technology, the feature size is decreasing which leads to higher defect densities. More sophisticated techniques at increased costs are required to avoid defects. If nano-technology fabrication are applied the yield may go down to zero as avoiding defect during fabrication will not be a feasible option Hence, feature architecture have to be defect tolerant. In regular structure like FPGA, redundancy is commonly used for fault tolerance. In this work we present a solution in which configuration bit-stream of FPGA is modified by a hardware controller that is present on the chip itself. The technique uses redundant device for replacing faulty device and increases the yield. The design is implemented using FPGA Altera Quartus II EC121Q240C6.
OMNeTA: A Hybrid Simulator for a Realistic Evaluation of Heterogeneous Networks

High-quality simulation tools are crucial to evaluate the energy efficiency of applications and protocols for wireless sensor networks in the most realistic way. Sensor node emulators like Avrora are well-suited for homogeneous networks but can not cope with heterogeneous networking scenarios. Wireless sensor networks have been used mostly isolated for special purposes in the past. But use cases like the so called smart environments require wireless sensor nodes to communicate and interact with other devices too. In this paper, we present OMNeTA as a solution to this problem, offering the ability to simulate highly heterogeneous networks of different device classes. Our hybrid simulation approach combines the proven hardware emulation by Avrora, radio communication simulation by \mixim and the flexibility of OMNeT++. Bridging the abstraction gap between hardware emulation and network simulation, OMNeTA may also reduce the effort required to experiment with new protocols, applications or other varying parameters, by enabling rapid-prototyping like development processes.
Deadlock-free scheduling of X10 computations with bounded resources

In this paper,we address the problem of guaranteeing the absence of physical deadlock in the execution of a parallel program using the async, finish, atomic, and place constructs from the X10 language. First, we extend previous work-stealing memory bound results for fully strict multi-threaded computations to terminally strict multithreaded computations in which one activity may wait for completion of a descendant activity (as in X10's async and finish constructs), not just an immediate child (as in Cilk 's spawn and sync constructs). This result establishes physical dead-lock freedom for SMP deployments.Second,we introduce a new class of X10 deployments for clusters, which builds on an underlying Active Message network and the new concept of Doppelgänger mode execution of X10 activities. Third, we use this new class of deployments to establish physical deadlock freedom for deployments on clusters of uniprocessors. Together these results give the user the ability to execute a rich set of programs written with async finish atomic and place constructs without worrying about the possibility of physical deadlock due to computation, memory and communication resources. A major open topic for future work is to extend these results to deployments on clusters of SMPs.
Image Inpainting with Gaussian Processes

This project investigates the applicability of Gaussian processes (GPs) as a prediction method for image inpainting, a process which reconstructs lost or deteriorated parts of an image based on the remaining portion. The use of GPs in this context not only allows us to make a single prediction for the missing region but also to draw multiple samples consistent with the context. Also, the covariance function of the GP can be adapted to the local image structure, to improve results. The main goal is to analyse the circumstances and extent to which the GP regressionmodel of Williams and Rasmussen (1996) can infer the missing parts of an image conditioned on its known parts. To do this, variations of the Squared-Exponential (SE) kernel are used, among which a new rotational-ARD SE kernel [1] is introduced to adapt to the inherent rotation of the local image structure. For evaluation, one randomly positioned patch of size 30×30 pixels is removed from each of 100 grayscale images with generic-themed content, and then manually categorised into image sets based on the arrangement of textures that compose the original content of each patch. We evaluate the relative performance of the different SE kernels on each of the image sets through a SMSE-based metric. A linear regression (LR) model is used as a simple baseline for comparison. The analysis shows that the GP regression model is effective for simple local image structures composed of low-frequency textures and edges with similar rotations.
Beyond the Unobservable : Inferred Openness to Foreign Direct Investment and Migration

Using a method commonly used to infer trade costs for goods, I construct bilateral openness measures to foreign direct investment (FDI) and to migration, for OECD country pairs. For FDI, barriers are reduced the most for three emerging hubs, the UK, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Little happens to bilateral openness to migration. Across country pairs and over time, FDI and migration openness are interdependent. I also infer a country's overall barriers to FDI for OECD countries. These barriers decline over time, a fact which must be corrected for in bilateral FDI regressions to avoid misspecification. Based on inspection of the inferred barriers, I propose to add countryspecific trends. By decomposing the growth in bilateral FDI, I show that the surge in FDI has mainly been driven by lower barriers to FDI (76%), not by economic growth. For the US, the contribution of bilateral barriers is lower (62%).
Adaptive photon clustering method based on quadtree structure for dynamic scenes

This work proposes a simple and effective strategy for photon clustering, called regional photon clustering, to accelerate the global illumination updating of dynamic scenes. This method can cluster various numbers of photons adaptively. The scenes in adjacent frames are similar, and so most photons have the same moving paths in adjacent frames. Therefore, most photons do not need to be shot again in the next frame. Regional photon clustering employs a quadtree structure to track the trajectory of dynamic objects to reduce the number of re-shot photons. Experimental results show that regional photon clustering reduces the number of re-shot photons, and accelerates the estimation of global illumination in dynamic scenes
Monitoring of bedridden patients: Development of a fall detection tool

Falls of patients are an important issue in hospitals nowadays; it causes severe injuries, increases hospitalization time and treatment costs. The detection of a fall, in time, provides faster rescue to the patient, preventing more serious injuries, as well as saving nursing time. The MovinSense® is an electronic device designed for monitoring patients to prevent pressure sores, and the main goal of this work was to develop a new tool for this device, with the purpose of detecting if the patient has fallen from the hospital bed, without changing any of the device's original features. Experiments for gathering data samples of inertial signals of falling from the bed were obtained using the device. For fall detection a sensitivity of 72% and specificity of 100% were reached. Another algorithm was developed to detect if the patient got out of his/her bed.
Analysis of Huntington disease linkage and age‐of‐onset distributions

Our analysis of the Huntington disease (HD) data set compares four different approaches for dealing with age of onset in HD and their effect on the resulting lod scores and estimates of the recombination fraction. The methods are: 1) estimation of the age of onset curve by the normal distribution using sample mean and variance for ages of onset from affected family members, 2) normal approximation using maximum likelihood which includes information on at-risk individuals, 3 ) an exponential-type distribution based upon published data adjusted to the data of Wendt et al. (19591, and 4) no adjustment for age of onset dichotomy assumed.
Whole Mount Enzyme Histochemistry as a Rapid Screen at Necropsy for Expression of β-Galactosidase (LacZ)–Bearing Transgenes: Considerations for Separating Specific LacZ Activity from Nonspecific (Endogenous) Galactosidase Activity

Whole mount enzyme histochemistry to localize lacZ-bearing transgenes (lacZ-WMH) also detects endogenous β-galactosidases. The experiments reported here evaluated lacZ-WMH as a potential tool for transgene expression analysis during high-throughput rodent necropsies. A lacZ-WMH survey of organs from adult, wild-type, male and female mice (C57BL/6, FVB/N) and female rats (Sprague-Dawley) performed at the optimal pH (≥ 7.0) for bacterial lacZ yielded intense endogenous staining in the gonads, kidney, male accessory sex organs, salivary glands, submucosal glands in the duodenum, and thyroid. Substantial staining occurred in the adrenal cortex, lymph nodes, and linings of the gastrointestinal tract, the urinary bladder and uterus, and (for rat only) in the adenohypophysis, bone marrow, thymus, and trigeminal ganglia. Endogenous galactosidases were distributed similarly in sections of flash-frozen organs used for slide-based lacZ histochemistry (lacZ-SBH) at pH ≤ 5.0 (optimal for eukaryotic enzymes). Cerebral neurons were labeled only by lacZ-SBH. At pH 7.4, endogenous but not specific lacZ activity was abolished for lacZ-SBH, while endogenous activity was not halted without reducing specific activity for lacZ-WMH. These data demonstrate that lacZ-WMH is feasible during rodent necropsies for many but not all organs if species-, strain-, and sex-specific divergence in endogenous galactosidase activity is considered and special fixation (3% paraformaldehyde for 3 hours at 4°C) is used.
SimiDroid: Identifying and Explaining Similarities in Android Apps

App updates and repackaging are recurrent in the Android ecosystem, filling markets with similar apps that must be identified and analysed to accelerate user adoption, improve development efforts, and prevent malware spreading. Despite the existence of several approaches to improve the scalability of detecting repackaged/cloned apps, researchers and practitioners are eventually faced with the need for a comprehensive pairwise comparison to understand and validate the similarities among apps. This paper describes the design of SimiDroid, a framework for multi-level comparison of Android apps. SimiDroid is built with the aim to support the understanding of similarities/changes among app versions and among repackaged apps. In particular, we demonstrate the need and usefulness of such a framework based on different case studies implementing different analysing scenarios for revealing various insights on how repackaged apps are built. We further show that the similarity comparison plugins implemented in SimiDroid yield more accurate results than the state-of-the-art.
BinRank: Scaling Dynamic Authority-Based Search Using Materialized Subgraphs

Dynamic authority-based keyword search algorithms, such as ObjectRank and personalized PageRank, leverage semantic link information to provide high quality, high recall search in databases, and the Web. Conceptually, these algorithms require a query-time PageRank-style iterative computation over the full graph. This computation is too expensive for large graphs, and not feasible at query time. Alternatively, building an index of precomputed results for some or all keywords involves very expensive preprocessing. We introduce BinRank, a system that approximates ObjectRank results by utilizing a hybrid approach inspired by materialized views in traditional query processing. We materialize a number of relatively small subsets of the data graph in such a way that any keyword query can be answered by running ObjectRank on only one of the subgraphs. BinRank generates the subgraphs by partitioning all the terms in the corpus based on their co-occurrence, executing ObjectRank for each partition using the terms to generate a set of random walk starting points, and keeping only those objects that receive non-negligible scores. The intuition is that a subgraph that contains all objects and links relevant to a set of related terms should have all the information needed to rank objects with respect to one of these terms. We demonstrate that BinRank can achieve subsecond query execution time on the English Wikipedia data set, while producing high-quality search results that closely approximate the results of ObjectRank on the original graph. The Wikipedia link graph contains about 10^8 edges, which is at least two orders of magnitude larger than what prior state of the art dynamic authority-based search systems have been able to demonstrate. Our experimental evaluation investigates the trade-off between query execution time, quality of the results, and storage requirements of BinRank.
An Image Compression Technique Based on the Novel Approach of Colorization Based Coding

In this paper, we formulate a method for the colorization-based coding problem . Previously, several colorization methods have been proposed to colorize grayscale images using only a few representative pixels provided by the user. An encoder extracts RP from an original color image and transmits RP and all luminance components (compressed by the conventional encoder) to a decoder. Then, the decoder restores a color image by colorization Obviously, to implement colorization-based coding, automatic RP extraction is required, and which extraction method is chosen determines the performance of the colorization-based coding method. In this paper the colorization-based coding problem is formulated into an optimization problem, i.e., an L1 minimization problem . By formulating the colorization-based coding into an L1 minimization problem, it is guaranteed that, given the colorization matrix, the chosen set of RP becomes the optimal set in the sense that it minimizes the error between the original and the reconstructed color image. We construct the colorization matrix that colorizes the image in a multiscale manner. Experimental results revealed that our method can drastically suppress the information amount (number of representative pixels) compared to conventional colorization based-coding and outperforms conventional colorizationbased coding methods as well as the JPEG standard and is comparable with the JPEG2000 compression standard, both in terms of the compression rate and the quality of the reconstructed color image.
Inferring exemplar discriminability in brain representations

Representational distinctions within categories are important in all perceptual modalities and also in cognitive and motor representations. Recent pattern-information studies of brain activity have used condition-rich designs to sample the stimulus space more densely. To test whether brain response patterns discriminate among a set of stimuli (e.g. exemplars within a category) with good sensitivity, we can pool statistical evidence over all pairwise comparisons. A popular test statistic reflecting exemplar information is the exemplar discriminability index (EDI), which is defined as the average of the pattern dissimilarity estimates between different exemplars minus the average of the pattern dissimilarity estimates between repetitions of identical exemplars. The EDI is commonly tested with a t test (H0: population mean EDI = 0) across subjects (subject as random effect). However, it is unclear whether this approach is either valid or optimal. Here we describe a wide range of statistical tests of exemplar discriminability and assess the validity (specificity) and power (sensitivity) of each test. The tests include previously used and novel, parametric and nonparametric tests, which treat subject as a random or fixed effect, and are based on different dissimilarity measures, different test statistics, and different inference procedures. We use simulated and real data to determine which tests are valid and which are most sensitive. The popular across-subject t test of the EDI (typically using correlation distance as the pattern dissimilarity measure) requires the assumption that the EDI is 0-mean normal under H0, which is not strictly true. Reassuringly, our simulations suggest that the test controls the false-positives rate at the nominal level and is thus valid in practice. However, test statistics based on average Mahalanobis distances or average linear-discriminant t values (both accounting for the multivariate error covariance among responses) are substantially more powerful for both random- and fixed-effects inference. We suggest preferred procedures for safely and sensitively detecting subtle pattern differences between exemplars.
Pitch Marking Based on an Adaptable Filter and a Peak-Valley Estimation Method

In a text-to-speech (TTS) conversion system based on the time-domain pitch-synchronous overlap-add (TD-PSOLA) method, accurate estimation of pitch periods and pitch marks is necessary for pitch modification to assure optimal quality of synthetic speech. In general, there are two major tasks in pitch marking: pitch detection and location determination. In this paper, an adaptable filter, which serves as a bandpass filter, is proposed for use in pitch detection to transform voiced speech into a sine-like wave. The pass band of the adaptable filter can be adapted based on the fundamental frequency. Based on the sine-like wave, a peak-valley decision method is proposed to determine the appropriate parts (positive part and negative part) of voiced speech for use in pitch mark estimation. In each pitch period, two possible peaks/valleys are searched, and dynamic programming is performed to obtain pitch marks. Experimental results indicate that our proposed method performs very well if correct pitch information is estimated.
Joint precoding and beamforming design for the downlink in a multiuser MIMO system

Assuming perfect channel knowledge at the transmitter, we study space-time beamforming for the downlink in a multiuser multi-input multi-output (MIMO) channel while a nonlinear interference pre-cancellation is presumed at the transmitter. The antenna arrays may be employed at both the transmitter and the receivers. The optimum transmit/receive beam vectors are obtained based on a minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) criterion and a per-user power constraint. In frequency selective fading channels, where orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is applied, the precoding and beamforming design is extended over space and frequency dimensions as well. In fact the proposed algorithm offers a unique method for assigning frequency bins in a MIMO-OFDMA system. The bit error rate performance of the proposed algorithm is assessed by computer simulations.
Corrosion of 2024 alloy after ultrasonic impact cladding with iron

The iron-containing layers were produced on the 2024 alloy surface using ultrasonic impact treatment (UIT) in the ambient air and argon environment. Multiple high-energy collisions of the pin of Armco-iron by the treated surface induce the iron cladding by means of solid-state welding of Fe dopants and Al substrate. SEM and EDX analysis and microhardness measurements showed a formation of oxide/intermetallic layers, which thickness ranges from 15–20 to 30–35 μm and hardness achieves ∼4 and ∼9 GPa after the argon-UIT and air-UIT processes, respectively. The polarisation tests in 3.5%NaCl medium showed that the layers are characterised by lower corrosion rates and more positive corrosion potentials than those of the original alloy owing to the formation of Alx-Fey intermetallics. The noblest behaviour was registered for the air-UIT-processed 2024 alloy.
A linguistic-engineering approach to large-scale requirements management

For large software companies, the sheer number of textual requirements presents specific challenges. To find market opportunities, organizations must continuously elicit new requirements and reevaluate old ones as market needs evolve. Developing large, complex software products aimed at broad markets involves identifying and maintaining the link between product requirements and the massive inflow of customers' wishes. Automating this support through linguistic engineering could save considerable time and improve software quality.
Group IV Direct Band Gap Photonics: Methods, Challenges, and Opportunities

The concept of direct band gap group IV materials offers a paradigm change for Si-photonics concerning the monolithic implementation of light emitters: The idea is to integrate fully compatible group IV materials with equally favorable optical properties as the chemically incompatible group III-V-based systems. The concept involves either mechanically applied strain on Ge or alloying of Ge with Sn and permits to drastically improve the insufficient radiative efficiency of Ge. The favorable optical properties result from a modified band structure transformed from an indirect to a direct one. The first demonstration of such a direct band gap laser, accomplished in GeSn, exemplifies the capability of this new concept. These systems may permit a qualitative as well as a quantitative expansion of Si-photonics into traditional but also new areas of applications, provided they can be operated energy efficiently, under ambient conditions and integrated with current Si technologies. This review aims to discuss the challenges along this path in terms of fabrication, characterization and fundamental understanding, and will elaborate on evoking opportunities of this new class of group IV-based laser materials.
Arctic Small Rodents Have Diverse Diets and Flexible Food Selection

The ecology of small rodent food selection is poorly understood, as mammalian herbivore food selection theory has mainly been developed by studying ungulates. Especially, the effect of food availability on food selection in natural habitats where a range of food items are available is unknown. We studied diets and selectivity of grey-sided voles (Myodes rufocanus) and tundra voles (Microtus oeconomus), key herbivores in European tundra ecosystems, using DNA metabarcoding, a novel method enabling taxonomically detailed diet studies. In order to cover the range of food availabilities present in the wild, we employed a large-scale study design for sampling data on food availability and vole diets. Both vole species had ingested a range of plant species and selected particularly forbs and grasses. Grey-sided voles also selected ericoid shrubs and tundra voles willows. Availability of a food item rarely affected its utilization directly, although seasonal changes of diets and selection suggest that these are positively correlated with availability. Moreover, diets and selectivity were affected by availability of alternative food items. These results show that the focal sub-arctic voles have diverse diets and flexible food preferences and rarely compensate low availability of a food item with increased searching effort. Diet diversity itself is likely to be an important trait and has previously been underrated owing to methodological constraints. We suggest that the roles of alternative food item availability and search time limitations for small rodent feeding ecology should be investigated. Nomenclature Annotated Checklist of the Panarctic Flora (PAF), Vascular plants. Available at: http://nhm2.uio. no/paf/, accessed 15.6. 2012.