Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Codeword assignment for cell-write reduction in non-volatile memory technologies

This thesis explores a context-independent limited-weight codeword assignment architecture for cell-write reduction in emerging single-level cell (SLC) and multi-level cell (MLC) non-volatile memories (NVMs). Cell-write reduction in NVMs has many practical benefits, including lower write latency, lower dynamic energy, and enhanced endurance. The proposed architecture, which is integrated into the memory controller, relies on an a priori analysis of memory access patterns and a remapping table to minimize overwrites in NVM cells. The baseline for comparison used for comparing our algorithms is a technique known as data-comparison write (DCW) which performs a cell-wise comparison of the write data before each operation. This reduces cell-writes by allowing only the cells whose value changes to be rewritten. Similarly, Flip-N-Write (FNW), a technique which allows each word written to memory to be optionally inverted, serves as the state-of-the-art technique our schemes outperform. Our first algorithm relies on the different frequencies with which each value is written to memory to perform a frequency-based assignment (FBA) of codewords. Based on a set of training data, the most frequently occurring values are mapped to limited-weight codes (LWC) to reduce the number of bit-writes. Our second algorithm further improves upon FBA by considering the sequence in which values transition to one another to perform a sequence-based assignment (SBA) of codewords. All three methods are then modified to provide similar improvements in multi-level cell (MLC) memories. Since bit-write reduction is distinct from cell-write reduction in MLC, the LWCs are changed for FBA, the algorithm used by SBA to calculate node weights are modified, and a different approach to cell inversion for FNW is considered. Trace-based simulations of the SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks show a 33× reduction in raw bit-writes in SLC and a 28× reduction in raw cell-writes in 2-bit MLC. These correspond to a 19% and 15% improvement over the best state-of-the-art method respectively.
Static Timing Analysis for Nanometer Designs: A Practical Approach

The book covers topics such as cell timing and power modeling; interconnect modeling and analysis, delay calculation, crosstalk, noise and the chip timing verification using static timing analysis. For each of these topics, the book provides a theoretical background as well as detailed examples to elaborate the concepts. The static timing analysis topics covered start from verification of simple blocks useful for a beginner to this field. The topics then extend to complex nanometer designs with in-depth treatment of concepts such as modeling of on-chip variation, clock gating, half-cycle paths, as well as timing of source-synchronous interfaces such as DDR. The impact of crosstalk on timing and noise is covered as is the usage of hierarchical design methodology. This book addresses CMOS logic gates, cell library, timing arcs, waveform slew, cell capacitance, timing modeling, interconnect parasitics and coupling, pre- and post-layout interconnect modeling, delay calculation, specification of timing constraints for analysis of internal paths as well as IO interfaces. Advanced modeling and analysis concepts such as controlled current source timing and noise models for nanometer technologies, power modeling including active and leakage power, crosstalk timing and crosstalk glitch calculation, verification of half-cycle and multi-cycle paths, false paths, synchronous interfaces are also covered.
A User's Manual for Computer Programs Used in: Model Choice: An Operational Comparison of Stochastic Streamflow Models for Droughts

The rapid development of stochastic or operational hydrology over the past 10 years has led to the need· for some comparative analyses of the currently available long-term persistence models. Five annual stochastic streamflow generation models (autoregressive, autoregressive-moving-average (ARMA), ARMA-Markov, fast fractional Gaussian noise, and broken line) are compared on their ability to preserve drought-related time series properties and annual statistics. Using Monte Carlo generation procedures and comparing the average generated statistics and drought or water supply properties, a basis is established to evaluate model performance on four different Utah study streams. A seasonal disaggregation model is applied to each of the generated annual models for each of the four study streams at a monthly disaggregation level. A model choice strategy is presented for the water resources engineer to select an annual stochastic streamflow model based on values of the historic time series' lag-one serial correlation and Hurst coefficient. Procedures are presented for annual and seasonal model parameter estimation, calibration, and generation. Techniques to ensure a consistent matrix for successful matrix decomposition are included such as normality, trend-analysis, and choice of model. User oriented model parameter estimation techniques that are easy and efficient to use are presented in a systematic manner. The ARMA-Markov and ARMA models are judged to be the best overall models in terms of preserving the short and long term persistence statistics for the four historic time series studied. The broken line model is judged to be the best model in terms of minimizing the economic regret as determined by an agricultural crop production function. Documentation and listings of the computer programs that were used for the stochastic models' parameter estimation, generation, and comparison techniques are presented in a supplementary appendix.
A note on presence terminology

This note addresses the confounding of the term 'presence' with several different distinct aspects of experience. Distinctions should be made between immersion, presence, involvement, emotional response, degree of interest. An analogy with colour science is pursued, specifically the difference between wavelength distribution and perception of colour - where the former is like 'immersion' the latter is like 'presence' (a human response). On top of this colours may be experienced as interesting, emotion-producing and so on. Just as the emotional experience engendered by a colour is not the same as the perception of the colour, which is not a simple function of the wavelength distribution, so involvement, interest or emotional response in a virtual reality is not the same as presence, which is not the same as immersion.
Static timing analysis in vlsi design

The increasing complexity of digital designs and the requirement of timing measurements in various design stages make static timing analysis critical. Each design stage utilizes static timing analysis to evaluate the system performance, and then optimizes the design accordingly. An accurate and efficient timing analysis package is crucial for the success of the whole design process. We studied three important problems in static timing analysis: false paths, multi-cycle paths, and hierarchical timing analysis. Static timing analysis should deal with false paths and multi-cycle paths to produce accurate timings. Previous published works focused on dealing with false paths in static timing analysis. There are several approaches; such as labeling algorithm and node-splitting approach, using tags to label and eliminate false path timings. A large number of tags need to be created and propagated. Thus, the efficiency is deteriorated. For hierarchical timing analysis, timing analysis iteratively performed on flatten circuits suffers from low efficiency because of increasing design complexity. Inspired by the gap between challenges and current sub-optimal solutions, we proposed three new techniques: (1) A two-direction propagation is proposed which minimizes the number of tagged false path timings using a biclique covering approach. We proved that all the non-false paths are covered and all the false paths are removed. A polynomial heuristic to perform the biclique covering minimization in minimal degree order is also introduced. (2) A framework unified processing false paths and multi-cycle paths is proposed which expands the tag-based approach for false paths to cover multi-cycle paths. Following the biclique covering approach for false paths, we devise time shifting for multi-cycle paths to improve the efficiency. We prove that the unified framework produces accurate timings. (3) An abstract, timing model reduction technique is proposed for hierarchical timing analysis. We introduce an iterative biclique-star replacement technique to minimize the abstract timing model, thus improving the efficiency. Combined the techniques proposed above, we provide an accurate and efficient static timing analysis package, which can be used in hierarchical design methodology.
Les thèmes du discours. Du concept à la méthode

Le reperage, la description ou l’etablissement des themes (topics) des discours sont un objectif majeur pour les analystes qui etudient le langage politique. Debout dans la cite, le discours politique vehicule de maniere explicite des messages, traite ou sous-entend des sujets, trahit des positions qu’il convient des lors de reveler ou de deconstruire. Les themes (etymologiquement ce qui est pose dans/par le discours) sont non seulement un element de comparaison utile entre les locuteurs dans.
Generalized Transformations and Restructuring in Romance

“Restructuring” in Romance refers to constructions which appear to violate standard locality constraints, thereby presenting a challenge for syntactic theory. In this paper I discuss how restructuring constructions can be handled in the framework of Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG), a system of generalized transformations used to compose phrase structure. There is no inter-clausal movement in TAG, since all such apparent movement is instead the result of local movement, with the adjoining operation used to separate components of a tree. As a consequence, some analyses for restructuring proposed in other analyses, such as cyclic head movement for clitic climbing, cannot be stated in TAG. Also, an attractive property of TAG is that the nature of the formalism itself does a large part of the job of the enforcement of locality constraints, such as subjacency. It therefore becomes an interesting question as to how an analysis of these restructuring non-local dependencies can be handled within TAG. The structure of the paper is as follows: Section 1 discusses the data on restructuring in Romance, section 2 gives an overview of TAG, section 3 discusses a TAG analysis of restructuring, and section 4 contains some concluding remarks.
Analysis of 3D viewing experience viasubjective evaluation methods

3D video technology has in recent years become immensely popular given the success 3D movieshave had at the cinemas. More and more people have therefore requested to be able to experiencethis 3D sensation beyond the cinematic screens, and at the comfort of one’s home in front of the TV.Leading television manufacturers have responded by producing modern television sets capable ofrendering 3D video, and several TV channels around the world have started to broadcast programsand movies in 3D. Since it is not yet clear what constitutes the overall visual experience of 3DTV, thepurpose of this master’s thesis project is to explore through subjective testing methods the relevancethat some aspects might have concerning the 3DTV viewing experience. Another aim is to advancethe standardization work regarding subjective evaluation methods for stereoscopic 3D videos. Key 3Dterminology and concepts are presented, as well as subjective evaluation methodologies.Stereoscopic 3D video sequences were produced; a customization of a rating-capable video playerwas made; 3D viewing-and-voting experiments with test subjects were carried out; differentattributes were incorporated into the experiments and evaluated such as video quality, visualdiscomfort, sense of presence and viewing distance; experiment data were collected and analyzed.The experiment results indicated that viewers in general showed an inclination to vote similarly forthe different attributes that were examined. This in turn showed that video sequences with thecharacteristics presented in the experiments, mostly coding related distortions, could be assessedwith subjective evaluation methods focusing solely on one rating scale concerning the general videoquality, which would give a good understanding of the 3D video quality experience.
Robust Agent Teams

There are certain tasks that can be completed better by a team and certain tasks that can only be completed by a team. To have efficient teamwork in a group of artificial agents, a coordination system must be used that is tolerant of mechanical errors and uncertainties in the world. In this thesis, I present two methods that each solve a different aspect of the robust teamwork problem. The first is tolerance to failures in communication. I suggest the use of a large group of mobile software agents, with each responsible for a single goal. The agents can jump from host to host when there is a line of communication, but stay still when there is none. The second is tolerance to uncertainty in the environment. By using a combination of Borda count voting and auctioning, the team is not easily confused by bad sensor data. A fast method of calculating the count is presented, and the two-step process is shown to be efficient and robust. At the end, I suggest a way to combine the two, by integrating dynamic team membership with voting and auctioning. By taking advantage of parts of both techniques, maximum robustness is assured.
Vibrotactile Feedback Generation Using Envelope Waveforms and Eccentric-Mass Motors

Vibrotactile Feedback Generation Using Envelope Waveforms and Eccentric-mass Motors Michael G. Plooster Department of Mechanical Engineering, BYU Master of Science The usefulness of vibrotactile feedback as a channel to communicate information has been widely recognized. However, most of the recent work on this subject uses actuators that are either too expensive or too large for many practical applications. This thesis explores the generation of vibrotacatile feedback patterns using a simple, inexpensive eccentric-mass motor that is constrained to use a constant voltage and a low on/off switching frequency. In particular, it explores the pulse timing method, which utilizes the slow transient response of the eccentric-mass motor to calculate pulse and rest times for an arbitrary envelope waveform shape. Several hardware tests were performed to (1) obtain a model of the transient response and (2) to verify that the resulting vibrations match the patterns predicted by the pulse timing method. Two custom built devices consisting of an eccentric-mass motor and a rigid housing were used in addition to a Wii remote. Vibrations for each device were measured and compared to the pattern predicted by the pulse timing method when the device was sitting on a table top and when the device was held in the hand. Results indicate that the vibrations match the predicted patterns very well in both cases. It was also determined that error in the motor’s transient response model will result in some error between the measured and predicted vibrations. To assess whether this error affects perception of the intended envelope waveform, a study was performed in which users were asked to identify the envelope waveform of vibration patterns created using curve-fit models that contained various levels of error. An analysis of variance revealed that error in the curve-fit will have an effect on the perception of the envelope waveform if the error is large. Two more user studies were performed to determine the perceptual space of patterns generated using the pulse timing method, and to determine whether users could identify the meanings encoded within vibration features. The Perceptual Space study used a cluster-sorted MultiDimensional Scaling analysis to determine that envelope waveform, roughness (deviation from the envelope waveform), and amplitude are vibration features that may be used to encode information. Using these features, participants were presented with vibrations that contained GPS navigation instructions similar to those used in a car, and were asked to identify the associated meaning. Users were able to correctly identify all three features with an average accuracy of 80.6%, and were able to correctly identify the envelope waveform and roughness with accuracies of 96.9% and 94.5% respectively. These results are evidence that the pulse timing method (and eccentric-mass motors in general) are capable of generating complex vibrotactile feedback patterns that can be uniquely identified.
TRADISI BULAN MUHARAM DI INDONESIA

Abstrak: Tradisi Bulan Muharam di Indonesia. Kekayaan tradisi budaya masyarakat Indonesia diwarnai oleh Islam sebagai agama yang dianut oleh masyarakat mayoritas. Persentuhan Islam dengan budaya lokal membawa pada keberagaman tradisi yang bernuansa Islam. Tradisi di bulan Muharam pada masyarakat Indonesia yang secara umum dilakukan pada tanggal 1-10 Muharam, direpresentasikan dalam berbagai bentuk dan ragam. Di Aceh terdapat tradisi bulan Asan Usin, Sumatra Barat dengan tradisi Tabuik , Bengkulu memiliki tradisi Tabut. Sedangkan di tanah Jawa, yang paling menunjol adalah tradisi kirab di kraton Jogjakarta dan Solo. Tulisan ini mendeskripsikan keberagaman tradisi masyarakat tersebut dalam perspektif sejarah dan budaya.
Contribution à la modélisation, conception et caractérisation de chaînes vidéo ASIC en technologie BICMOS

Les chaines video dediees aux applications spatiales sont etudiees. L'accent est mis sur l'optimisation de la conception analogique en technologie bicmos. La comparaison d'architectures, la specification des blocs fonctionnels, la modelisation des transistors elementaires, l'optimisation de miroirs de courant, la caracterisation sous irradiation, la conception de suiveurs analogiques et d'amplificateurs, la realisation de prototypes de test et les mesures electriques sont developpees. Les resultats obtenus serviront a la synthese d'une bibliotheque de fonctions analogiques specifique au besoin spatial
Context dependent speech recognition

Poor speech recognition is a problem when developing spoken dialogue systems, but several studies has showed that speech recognition can be improved by post-processing of recognition output that use the dialogue context, acoustic properties of a user utterance and other available resources to train a statistical model to use as a filter between the speech recogniser and dialogue manager. In this thesis a corpus of logged interactions between users and a dialogue system was used to extract features from previous dialogue context, acoustics from the user utterance and n-best recognition hypotheses. The features were used to train maximum entropy models with different feature sets to rerank the n-best hypotheses. The models fail to some extent to predict intended labels but using the reranked output in effect means that 94.9% of the adequate hypotheses will be sent to the dialogue manager, a decrease in relative error over baseline with 44.6% showing that contextual reranking can improve speech recognition for dialogue systems. Future work involves developing the current feature sets and maxEnt models to better classify whether a hypothesis should be accepted or rejected by the dialogue system rather than rerank them.
Active Learning : an unbiased approach. (L'apprentissage actif : une approche non biaisée)

Active Learning arises as an important issue in several supervised learning scenarios where obtaining data is cheap, but labeling is costly. In general, this consists in a query strategy, a greedy heuristic based on some selection criterion, which searches for the potentially most informative observations to be labeled in order to form a training set. A query strategy is therefore a biased sampling procedure since it systematically favors some observations by generating biased training sets, instead of making independent and identically distributed draws. The main hypothesis of this thesis lies in the reduction of the bias inherited from the selection criterion. The general proposal consists in reducing the bias by selecting the minimal training set from which the estimated probability distribution is as close as possible to the underlying distribution of overall observations. For that, a novel general active learning query strategy has been developed using an Information-Theoretic framework. Several experiments have been performed in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed strategy. The obtained results confirm the hypothesis about the bias, showing that the proposal outperforms the baselines in different datasets.
Mechanizing Exploratory Game Design

Game design is an art form that deals with inherently interactive artifacts. Game designers craft games (assembled from rule systems and content), but they really seek to manipulate play: the interaction between games and players. When developing new games that are similar to past games, a designer may rely on previous experience with related designs and relatively easy access to players familiar with conventional design choices. When exploratorily venturing into uncharted territory, uncovering games that afford novel modes of play, there is a need for practical and technological interventions that improve a designer's access to feedback from the unfamiliar design scenario. In the interdisciplinary space between game design, design studies, computational creativity, and symbolic artificial intelligence (AI), my program of mechanizing exploratory game design aims to amplify human creativity in game design; enable new game designs through deep, play-time design automation; and demonstrate novel tools that respect the concerns of design problems. This dissertation advances a practice of modeling design spaces as logic programs in the answer set programming (ASP) paradigm. Answer set programs can concisely encode the key conditions of artifact appropriateness, and, paired with state of the art algorithms for combinatorial search and optimization, they yield efficient and expressively sculptable artifact generators. I present three major applications of ASP-encoded design spaces to exploratory game design: a powerful machine playtesting tool for analyzing designer-specified games, a novel game prototype employing machine-generated rulesets bound by iteratively discovered constraints, and a suite of level design automation tools that offer unprecedented control over the aesthetic and pedagogical properties of puzzles for a widely deployed educational game. This practice is further developed in a series of introductory programming and advanced modeling tutorials. By formally modeling design spaces as concise and authorable logic programs (and without the need for original algorithm design and maintenance), designer-programmers are broadly empowered to quickly build and evolve the in-house automation required by their own exploratory game design projects. These claims are backed by a spreading adoption of this practice by others and deployed applications to at-scale game design projects. Taken as a whole, this dissertation offers new insight into the nature of game design in relation to other design disciplines, a new design research practice for understanding how design thinking can and should be mechanized, a novel model of transformational creativity suitable for discussing both humans and machines, and a set of new applications for symbolic AI that simultaneously broaden the applicability and tax the limits of this automated reasoning infrastructure.