Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Resource Management for Multicores to Optimize Performance under Temperature and Aging Constraints

Driven by the ever-increasing performance demand, multicore processors have emerged enabling concurrent computations on a single chip. A multicore processor can be exploited by executing multiple applications simultaneously on the chip. Furthermore, multiple threads of each application can be also executed in parallel on multiple cores. To optimize for performance in multicores, it is necessary to employ resource management techniques that manage the resources of the chip considering the running applications. Specifically, resource management can allocate more cores to applications to exploit their parallelism and upscale the voltage and frequency levels (V/f levels) of the cores to increase their speeds. While such potential decisions of resource management improve the performance, they may, unfortunately, elevate the on-chip temperatures, which have negative impacts on reliability. One of the major temperature-dependent reliability concerns is the circuit aging. In particular, aging leads to an increase in the threshold voltage, which, in turn, may increase the delay of the processor’s paths and eventually induce timing errors. Due to the adverse impacts of temperature and aging on reliability, they have been considered as dire design constraints. Therefore, this dissertation focuses on the relevant problem of performance optimization under temperature and aging constraints. To achieve this goal, several resource management techniques are introduced in this dissertation to maximize the overall system performance, while satisfying temperature and aging constraints within the decision making process. Firstly, temperature-constrained resource management techniques are proposed for homogenous and heterogeneous multicores. These techniques allocate cores to multithreaded applications, indicating the number of parallel threads of each application, and determine the V/f level of the cores that execute each application. These decisions are conducted while taking into account the Thread Level Parallelism (TLP) and the Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP) of the applications, aiming at maximizing the overall system performance under a temperature constraint. Moreover, the positioning of inactive (power-gated) cores throughout the chip is selected such that they facilitate dissipating the generated heat from active cores. That, in turn, reduces the temperature of active cores and allows upscaling their V/f levels leading to further performance improvement. Afterwards, an aging-constrained resource management technique is introduced with the goal of maximizing the overall system performance under an aging constraint. Towards achieving this goal, an aging-aware design space is explored, which translates temperature and voltage into the resulting amount of aging quantified as an increase
Development and Application of a Software Tool/Package for Pan-Genomic Analysis

Continuing scientific progress in genetics allows us to better understand how structural variations in an organism’s gene content can lead to diversity within a species. By analyzing the sum of the genes for an entire species, we can construct a pangenome for the species. The pangenome of a species is the set of all genes present in all sub-species of a species. It consists of the core genome, which represents the genes present in all sub-species, and a variable genome, which refers to genes not present in all sub-species. micropan is an R package designed for the study of microbial pan-genomics. The genomes of prokaryotes (microbes) are relatively simple, leading to relatively simple construction of their pangenome. By comparison, plant genomes are highly repetitive and complex in comparison, and there is no general tool/package developed for pangenome construction for plant species. Due to the computational requirements of constructing such a pangenome, the tool/package required needs to be more flexible, efficient and robust than micropan. In this paper, we developed a pangenome construction pipeline that works for both prokaryotes and eukaryotes. The design of this pipeline will allow it to adapt to different selections of gene annotation and gene clustering methods. With a more efficient and robust tool/package constructed, future research can discover how to extend it from draft or finished genomes to sequencing reads.
Development of a Japanese and English Speech Synthesis System Based on HMM Using Voice Conversion for the People with Speech Communication Disorder

In this paper, we describe our work on developing a bilingual communication aid for a Japanese amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patient. For this study, HTS toolkit was used to develop the system. First developed was a Japanese speech synthesis and two methods were attempted. The first used an acoustic model built from the recordings of the patient’s read speech. The second used an acoustic model built from a voice converted to the patient’s voice. The result of the perceptual experiment showed that the voice synthesized with the latter was perceived to have a closer voice quality to the patient’s natural speech. An acoustic model for English speech synthesis system was built and GUI works on windows was developed for the patient to use.
A method to estimate the Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram using Bus GPS Data

Some approaches have been proposed by literature to describe the traffic state for a network, such as kinematic wave theory (using concepts from Physics), cell transmission models or macroscopic traffic simulation models. However, many of them have severe limitations regarding traffic state change or require a lot of computation time. For this reason, researchers have been examining for last years the existence of a simple and fast way that can sufficiently describe the dynamics of a road network. As a result, the concept of the Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram (MFD) an object (empirical relation, theoretical model or both) that relates the average flow to the average density of a network, capturing so the essential network situation was developed. Once the MFD of the network is known, all that is needed to have a traffic state estimation is to locate where the system is on the MFD at any desired moment, so it serves as a fundamental object for macroscopic traffic flow models. These family of models allow describing the spatio-temporal evolution of traffic density, for instance, and lead to clever solutions that optimize the existing traffic system. Thus, the objective of this project is to present a method for obtaining a network MFD using bus GPS data and a data structure developed by Uber (Uber’s H3 Hexagonal Hierarchical Spatial Index). We use a raw data collection of latitude and longitude data points of buses in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from January 2018 to December 2018. It is worth mentioning that the resulting MFD of the proposed method serves as a basis to support the development of public transportation management systems, which is able to make accurate traffic state predictions. The findings confirm the usefulness of bus GPS data and Uber H3 structure in finding a Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram, especially the Density-speed one, and future research directions are addressed. Key-words: Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram. Traffic Theory. Traffic State. Probe Vehicles. GPS bus data. Uber H3.
Dual direction SCR with deep well structure for high voltage ESD in communication bus

In order to improve the robustness of the ESD of the dual-direction silicon-controlled rectifier, a low doping deep well PB structure is proposed instead of the traditional high doping P+ structure. The ESD stress of the dual-direction SCR devices with deep well structure is discharged from inside and the lattice temperature of the device is low to avoid premature burnout of the device. The deep well PB structure on the surface of the device increases the parasitic resistance of the device and improve the conduction uniformity of the device. As the main conduction path of the device is located in NBL, the PB structure does not have a large influence on the sustain voltage. It is verified in a 0.25 μm BCD process. With equivalent circuit and two-dimensional device simulation, the working mechanism is analyzed. According to the transmission line pulse test results and comparing with the data from traditional dual-direction SCR structure. The device’s fault current increases from 5.486 A to 8.13 A which is suitable for communication bus high voltage electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection.
Model-driven design of self-observing products

Current complex electronic products are designed and developed by multi-disciplinary teams of stakeholders, and they are sold to customers world-wide who are often overwhelmed with the complexity of products. Product creation processes lack information about product usage and user experience in the field. This information deficit clearly has a negative effect on current and future product creation, but also on the entire business development. Prior approaches to acquire usage data via logging, extensive prototype evaluation, and market research studies, miss benefits of connected and rich information. In this thesis, new technology is researched and developed to bridge this gap and to reveal actual customer needs and expectations. This thesis first presents a theoretical approach to remote data collection that begins with "observables" within complex electronic products. It is shown how high-quality information about usage and context of products in the field can be obtained from these observables; precisely the information that is meaningful to stakeholders. It is described how additional local processing and semantics have to be applied in a stakeholder-friendly way such that desired information can be extracted. Finally, data quality can be further improved by jointly collecting objective and subjective data, that is, what users do and why they do it, in a structured way. Building on the previously described theoretical approach to remote data collection we pursued a generic framework that illustrates how operational observation systems can be created, including a dedicated development process and a run-time system architecture. This enables low-impact, real-time data collection on the one hand, and, on the other hand, allows stakeholders to visually specify observation and data analysis with a graphical language. The extensive body of knowledge about the domain of observation has also been captured in models, design patterns, and ontologies that allows for reuse and extension of observation concepts and tools for other application domains. The research project is embedded in a larger multi-disciplinary research project, the Soft Reliability IOP-IPCR project, sponsored by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, which enables tackling the lack of information from different perspectives. This collaboration and industrial case-studies showed the feasibility and relevance of the research. The technology presented in this thesis is currently being commercialized for real-life application in the business contexts of industrial stakeholders.
Two-Step Training and Mixed Encoding-Decoding for Implementing a Generative Chatbot with a Small Dialogue Corpus

Generative chatbot models based on se-quence-to-sequence networks can generate natural conversation interactions if a huge dialogue corpus is used as training data. However, except for a few languages such as English and Chinese, it remains difficult to collect a large dialogue corpus. To address this problem, we propose a chatbot model using a mixture of words and syllables as encoding-decoding units. In addition, we propose a two-step training method, involving pre-training using a large non-dialogue corpus and re-training using a small dialogue corpus. In our experiments, the mixture units were shown to help reduce out-of-vocabulary (OOV) problems. Moreover, the two-step training method was effective in reducing grammatical and semantical errors in responses when the chatbot was trained using a small dialogue corpus (533,997 sentence pairs).
Design of a high speed high power switched reluctance motor

An increase in the price of rare earth materials in 2009 prompted research into alternative motor technologies without permanent magnets. The SRMs have become more of an attractive solution as they are relatively simpler to construct than other machines technologies hence cost effective. Furthermore, the rugged structure of the rotor makes it suitable for high speed operation, if appropriately designed. This thesis investigates the design, analysis and prototype manufacture of an SRM, that from electromagnetic point of view, meets the power output of the PM machine used in the Toyota Prius, although operating at a higher speed of 50,000 rpm. As a result, the required torque is considerably less than an equivalent motor with the same output power running at lower speed, hence this approach allows for much smaller frame sizes. To achieve the required torque, careful choice of stator/rotor tooth combination, coil number of turns and number of phases is needed. Running at high speed, increases the AC copper loss (consisting of skin effect and proximity effects) and iron loss. These shortcomings are extensively discussed and investigated. The mechanical design of this motor requires careful consideration in order to minimise the high mechanical stresses acting upon the rotor, which are due to the high radial forces caused by the centripetal force at high speed. In order to address the mechanical constraints caused by the hoop stress, a structure common to flywheels is applied to the rotor. In this approach, the shaft bore is removed and the laminations are sandwiched together using cheek plates, which are secured using tie rods. The cheek plates have their extending shafts, which consequently will transfer the torque to the rest of the system. The proposed model is analysed for both the electromagnetic and mechanical aspects, successfully demonstrating a promising rotor topology for the design speed. A high speed motor design needs to take into account shaft design, rotor design and bearing design. The high speed operation of the salient rotor gives dramatic rise to the windage loss. These factors are carefully considered in this work and the results are presented.
More than simply microbial growth curves

Bacterial growth is a very important piece of information in a wide range of investigation and, in most of the time the data are simply shown directly without any further processing. In a single factor investigation without comparative information to be extracted, this simple approach can be used together with other data to form a comprehensive set of results. When comparison is involved, such direct showing of bacterial growth curves without processing cannot warrant a meaningful comparison thoroughly and further processing of data is necessary. In addition, there is little, if any, quantitative data for the comparison from the display of growth curves and description of a number of curves is not a simple task, especially in a meaningful way for assimilation of the data to readers. With this in mind, I would like to remind of those who plan to show such data as growth curves for their potential publication to carry this further to generate comparative results for a much meaningful interpretation by modeling and calculation from the raw growth data over time of incubation. By calculating with existing equations, the lag phase, growth rate and the biomass can be derived from a series of growth curves for a more effective and meaningful analysis. This approach is not new, but remembrance of such available tool is more important so that research data are shown professionally and also scientifically for meaning presentation and effective assimilation.
Synthesis and biological evaluation of an epidermal growth factor receptor-targeted peptide-conjugated phthalocyanine-based photosensitiser

A peptide-conjugated zinc(ii) phthalocyanine containing the epidermal growth factor receptor-targeted heptapeptide QRHKPRE has been prepared. The conjugate labelled as ZnPc-QRH* can selectively bind to the cell membrane of HT29 human colorectal adenocarcinoma cells in 10 min followed by internalisation upon prolonged incubation via receptor-mediated endocytosis, leading to localisation in lysosomes eventually. By manipulating the incubation time, the subcellular localisation of the conjugate can be varied and the cell-death pathways induced upon irradiation can also be altered. It has been found that photosensitisation initiated at the cell membrane and in the lysosomes would trigger cell death mainly through necrosis and apoptosis respectively. Intravenous administration of the conjugate into HT29 tumour-bearing nude mice resulted in higher accumulation in the tumour than in most major organs. The selective binding of this conjugate to tumour has also been demonstrated by comparing the results with those of the analogue with a scrambled peptide sequence (EPRQRHK). The overall results indicate that ZnPc-QRH* is a promising EGFR-targeted photosensitiser for photodynamic therapy.
Sliding Mode Control of Wind Energy Conversion System Using Dual Star Synchronous Machine and Three Level Converter

Received: 10 January 2019 Accepted: 22 April 2019 This paper investigates a dual star synchronous machine powered by two independent threelevel voltage source inverters integrated in a wind turbine system (Figure 1). The dual star synchronous machine is used in areas of high power industrial applications such as naval propulsion, traction systems and renewable energy. This use is motivated by several important advantages compared to classical three-phase machine. In this work, the machine side converters control the dq component current by a conventional method based PI regulator, and then the load side converters control the DC bus voltage using sliding mode approach and the RMS voltage load. The validity of the proposed control technique is verified by Matlab/Simulink. Simulation results presented in this paper confirm the validity and feasibility of the proposed control approach, and can be tested on experimental setup.
Design of a microelectromechanical systems microgripper with integrated electrothermal actuator and force sensor

This article presents the conceptual design of a novel compliant microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)-based gripper with integrated electrothermal actuator and electrothermal force sensor. By this design solution, the device possesses some unique characteristics including a small and compact footprint size, and a large driving force by the thermal actuator. Owing to the use of a compliant rotational bearing, a large gripping range is obtained. The sensing arm has a capability of detecting the force transmitted from the left arm so as to prevent the damage of the grasped object. Analytical models are developed to evaluate the statics and dynamics performance of the gripper. Simulation results show that the thermal actuator produces sufficient gripping force to execute the gripping operation with a range of 80 µm under a low input voltage of 6 V. Moreover, the results of the established theoretical models match well with the finite element analysis (FEA) simulation results, which verifies the feasibility of the proposed gripper design.
Bioassay to assess toxicity of water-dispersed engineered nanomaterials in plants; Scientific Operating Procedure Series : Toxicology (T)

Determining the toxicity of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) to plants is important from an environmental perspective. Due to the absence of standardized phytotoxicity test methods for ENMs, a number of methods have been used and have produced inconsistent—and, consequently, unusable—results. This document describes a scientific operating procedure (SOP) to test the effects of plant chronic exposure to low doses of ENMs. The SOP is not specific to any particular ENM, but is designed to be applicable to any ENM that can be dispersed in water. Relying on Col-0, the highly homozygous wild-type laboratory strain of Arabidopsis, the method mitigates biological variance inherent in bioassay-based tests. In vitro growth conditions allow for the use of uniform synthetic growth medium and the exclusion of microbes. The detection of toxicity threshold is based on measuring the number of rosette leaves and the total exposed leaf area. If a physiological impact on the plant is detected, it is confirmed by the detection of ENM-induced changes in gene expression at the toxicity threshold to ensure that gene expression analysis is performed on plants grown at sublethal ENM concentrations. ENM-induced gene expression changes are then validated with the independent method of real-time quantitative PCR (qPCR). DISCLAIMER: The contents of this report are not to be used for advertising, publication, or promotional purposes. Citation of trade names does not constitute an official endorsement or approval of the use of such commercial products. All product names and trademarks cited are the property of their respective owners. The findings of this report are not to be construed as an official Department of the Army position unless so designated by other authorized documents. DESTROY THIS REPORT WHEN NO LONGER NEEDED. DO NOT RETURN IT TO THE ORIGINATOR.
Pairing dual‐frequency GPR in summer and winter enhances the detection and mapping of coarse roots in the semi‐arid shrubland in China

To complement traditional methods of studying coarse roots (>2 mm in diameter) that are often destructive, laborious and point‐based, we tested a dual‐frequency ground‐penetrating radar (GPR) to non‐invasively map lateral coarse roots of shrubs (Caragana microphylla Lam.) in the sandy soil of a temperate semi‐arid shrubland. The dual‐frequency GPR system used in this study simultaneously collects data with two antenna frequencies (400 and 900 MHz). The GPR surveys were repeated in a grid (11 × 4.8 m2 with a total of 46 survey lines) in summer and winter. Both antenna frequencies and seasonal GPR surveys generated a consistent pattern of the distribution of lateral coarse roots, indicating reliable interpretation of GPR data for coarse roots mapping. The 400 MHz GPR and the winter survey detected more roots in the deeper soil (>0.6 m depth), whereas the 900 MHz GPR and the summer survey detected more in the shallower soil (<0.6 m depth). The higher wave velocity and lower degree of GPR energy attenuation in the frozen soil enhanced the detection of deep coarse roots. Combining root detection results obtained under all conditions revealed a higher distribution density of lateral coarse roots beneath a depression and at the depth of 0.4–0.6 m, but a lower abundance under the intershrub area (i.e. showing the avoidance of intershrub root overlap). These patterns were not evident in GPR images collected using a single frequency antenna in one season. Ground truthing confirmed that pairing GPR data collected at two frequencies improved the detection frequency of the number of lateral coarse roots. More field tests are required to validate the application of repeated dual‐frequency GPR surveys to detect and quantify coarse roots in other ecosystems.