Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reliability management techniques in SSD storage systems

Solid State Devices (SSDs) are becoming ubiquitous in many embedded devices due to their features such as no moving parts, shock/temperature resistance and low power consumption. The reliability, performance, lifespan, and verification of these devices is an increasing issue in many application domains. Redundant Array of Independent Disk (RAID) architectures have previously been used to increase reliability of magnetic disk devices. Recent works have proposed re-use of RAID architectures to address these issues in SSDs, however these have an inherent problem as all flash memory chips wear out at the same rate due to even distribution of write operations. Existing solutions partly solve this problem using uneven parity distribution across the array, but suffer age-variation problems under random and sequential writes thereby decreasing the reliability of the array as well as increasing the cost. The aim of this thesis is to enhance the use of RAID mechanisms in SSD storage systems, and to do so in a reliable, and efficient manner. In this thesis the two novel mechanisms are explored that enhance data reliability in a SSD array regardless of I/O workload characteristics. The first mechanism solves the age convergence problem in RAID systems and quickly achieves steady-state age convergence. The second mechanism reduces page writes, thereby increasing the lifespan of each element in the array. The SSD controller ( A NFS ) architecture and the associated RAID architecture (flash-RAID) are presented. The embedded Flash Translation Layer (FTL), RAID controller, SSD low level controller, and specialized host interface are developed on an FPGA in synthesizable Verilog. In these architectures the concept of a forced random write is introduced which is used to solving the age distribution problem of pure sequential writes. It further employs a log-structured approach to control on-chip wear-levelling, and a power-fail reliability mechanism. In addition to this a new flash management framework is presented that increases the performance of SSD storage systems in the exploitation of both multi-chip parallelism and out-of-order execution. The contribution of this thesis can be summarised as follows: the presentation of new algorithms that successfully enable the efficient and reliable RAID techniques in SSD devices, the development of a number of techniques that enhance the performance and reliability of flash-based file systems, the implementation of a controller in synthesizable Verilog that employs these techniques, and the provision of a complete test bed supporting the experiments.
Integrating planning, execution, and learning

To achieve the goal of building an autonomous agent, the usually disjoint capabilities of planning, execution, and learning must be used together. An architecture, called MAX, within which cognitive capabilities can be purposefully and intelligently integrated is described. The architecture supports the codification of capabilities as explicit knowledge that can be reasoned about. In addition, specific problem solving, learning, and integration knowledge is developed.
The effects of network topology on strategic behavior

The central question this thesis addresses is: if players are arranged in a network, and they are strategically interacting only with other players in their local neighborhood, how does the topology of the network affect the outcome of the interaction? We answer this question by combining techniques from computer science, economics, and sociology. First, we introduce a graphical market model consisting of a bipartite network with buyers on one side and sellers on the other. Trade can only occur between a buyer and a seller if they are adjacent. We characterize when there will be variation in equilibrium wealth in terms of the network topology. Furthermore, we quantify the equilibrium wealth variation in social networks in terms of the degree distribution. Both of these results show that the network topology strongly affects the equilibrium behavior in this model. We also analyze a similar model where the players must buy the edges and trade according to the network that was purchased. We give a complete characterization of the equilibrium networks in this model. Second, we assess a model of evolutionary game theory over networks. Evolutionary game theory has been used to model biological and social interactions where the dynamics are more imitative than optimizing. For two broad classes of graphs, we characterize which strategies could be played by a large fraction of the population that would guarantee they could not be overrun by any small mutant invasion. Here again, the topology of the networks under study had a direct impact on the structure of equilibria. The final main component of this work is experimental in nature. A group of undergraduates was instructed to solve the graph coloring problem. Each one used our software system to control the color of one node in a network, and their objective was to arrive at a valid coloring. We varied the topology of the network by using different generative models from social network theory. One key finding of this experiment was that the group could color networks with low diameter much faster than networks with high diameter---showing that network topology impacted group behavior.
Fuzzy information engineering: a guided tour of applications

Partial table of contents: CLARIFYING INFORMATION: SENSING AND ENHANCING. Elicitation, Pooling, and Assessment of Expert Opinion in the Possibilistic Framework (S. Sandri). CLARIFYING INFORMATION: ABSTRACTING AND MODELING. Learning from Imperfect Data (B. Bouchon-Meunier, et al.). RETRIEVING INFORMATION: QUERYING. Extending SQL Retrieval Features for the Handling of Flexible Queries (P. Bosc & O. Pivert). A Fuzzy SQL Summary Language for Data Discovery (D. Rasmussen & R. Yager). RETRIEVING INFORMATION: REASONING. Fuzzy Set Methods in Inheritance Networks (R. Yager). EXPLOITING INFORMATION: DECISION-MAKING. Operators in Models of Decision Making (H. Zimmermann). Risk Management with Imprecise Information (K. Engermann, et al.). EXPLOITING INFORMATION: DESIGNING AND OPTIMIZING. Fuzzy Scheduling: Principles and Experiments (H. Fargier). Index.
Multimedia-Enhanced Instruction in Online Learning Environments

vi LIST OF TABLES. xiv LIST OF FIGURES. xv CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION. 1 Online Learning Environments: Expanding Definitions . 2 Learning and Teaching in an Online Environment . 3 Background of the Problem. 4 Challenges in Online Teaching. 4 Meeting the Needs of the "Net Generation" . 8 Theoretical Framework. 9 Statement of the Problem . 10 Importance of the Study . 10 Assumptions. 12 Limits. 12 Delimits . 13 CHAPTER 2: REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE. 14
The Screenwriter's Bible: A Complete Guide to Writing, Formatting, and Selling Your Script

The "Screenwriter's Bible" is one of the most popular, authoritative, and useful books on screenwriting. A standard by which other screenwriting books are measured, it has sold 150,000 copies in its ten-year life. Always up-to-date and reliable, it contains everything that both the budding and working screenwriter need under one cover -- six books in one! Features: How to Write a Screenplay -- a concise course on screenwriting basics; Correct Format for Screenplays and Teleplays -- a style guide to the latest in industry-accepted formats; Steps to a Stunning Script -- a step-by-step guide to the screenwriting process from nascent idea through revisions; Writing Your Breakthrough Spec Script -- the keys to a marketable script; How to Sell Your Script -- marketing and sales strategies and information about today's marketplaces; Resources -- lists of industry contacts and useful screenwriting tools and services. This new edition offers expanded coverage of dialogue writing and character development, the latest in proper screenplay format, a new section on jumpstarting your career, new advice on creating and delivering pitches, more new successful writing tips and pointers, new and revised writing exercises, updated film examples, and an expanded index.
Embodied Properties of Semantic Knowledge Acquired From Natural Language

The symbol interdependency hypothesis (Louwerse, 2007, 2008) posits that wordmeaning is dependent upon two sources of information: embodied or grounded knowledge, obtained from observation of and interaction with the physical world, and symbolic or co-occurrence information, gleaned from experience with how words are used together in written and spoken language. This theory assumes that embodied properties of objects influence the statistical structure of language to such an extent that the embodied properties become partially encoded within the structure of language. The work presented in this dissertation provides support for the symbol interdependency hypothesis by demonstrating that grounded knowledge (in the form of physical and behavioural properties of living and non-living objects) can be identified by analyzing word usage in a large body of written text. An automated method of creating high-dimensional vector-based semantic representations is presented. Several demonstrations show that the representations capture word meaning in a way that aligns with intuition and are able to reproduce non-intuitive results of experiments from the psycholinguistic literature. A feedforward neural network was trained to produce a list of physical and behavioural properties of an object in response to the object’s high-dimensional vector representation. The resulting network was able to identify features of the concepts on which it was trained with near-perfect accuracy and was able to generalize this ability to novel concepts and identify properties of concepts to which it was not previously exposed. These results indicate that there is sufficient information in word usage to identify embodied properties of concepts, a finding that is consistent with the symbol interdependency hypothesis.
An Analytical Motion Filter for Humanoid Robots

(ABSTRACT) Mimicking human motion with a humanoid robot can prove to be useful for studying gaits, designing better prostheses, or assisting the elderly or disabled. Directly mimicking and implementing a motion of a human on a humanoid robot may not be successful because of the different dynamic characteristics between them, which may cause the robot to fall down due to instability. Using the Zero Moment Point as the stability criteria, this work proposes an Analytical Motion Filter (AMF), which stabilizes a reference motion that can come from human motion capture data, gait synthesis using kinematics, or animation software, while satisfying common constraints. In order to determine how the AMF stabilized a motion, the different kinds of instabilities were identified and classified when examining the reference motions. The different cases of instability gave more insight as to why a particular motion was unstable: the motion was too fast, too slow, or inherently unstable. In order to stabilize the gait two primary methods were utilized: time and spatial scaling. Spatial scaling scaled the COM trajectory down towards a known stable trajectory. Time scaling worked similarly by changing the speed of the motion, but was limited in effectiveness based on the types of instabilities in the motion and the coupling of the spatial directions. Other constraints applied to the AMF and combinations of the different methods produced interesting results that gave more insight into the stability of the gait. The AMF was tested using both simulations and physical experiments using the DARwIn miniature humanoid robot developed by RoMeLa at Virginia Tech as the test platform. The simulations proved successful and provided more insight to understanding instabilities that can occur for different gait generation methods. The physical experiments worked well for non-walking motions, but because of insufficient controllability in the joint actuators of the humanoid robot used for the experiment, the high loads during walking motions prevented them from proper testing. The algorithms used in this work could also be expanded to legged robots or entirely different platforms that depend on stability and can use the ZMP as a stability criterion. One of the primary contributions of this work was showing that an entire reference motion could be stabilized using a single set of closed form solutions and equations. Previous work by others considered optimization functions and numeric schemes to stabilize all or a portion of a gait. Instead, the Analytical Motion Filter gives …
L'éducateur comme passeur de sens

A la fin de son roman intitule "Siddharta", l'ecrivain Hermann Hesse represente l'aboutissement de l'aventure ontologique de son heros en la personne d'un vieux passeur sur le fleuve. Son ami de jeunesse, Govinda, toujours en quete spirituelle, ne le reconnait pas et continue a suivre son Maitre. Il meconnait ainsi tout ce qu'un "passeur" vers l' "autre rive" comme disent les sages orientaux, pouvait lui apporter. Nous aussi, dans notre monde tourmente, nous avons besoin de passeurs entre de.
Applied legal epistemology. Building a knowledge-based ontology of the legal domain

and concrete knowledge, and between factual and practical knowledge. A piece of knowledge can be classified through these three distinctions. Accordingly, different sets of knowledge criteria are applied. 5) Some knowledge acquisition situations in the legal domain can be classified as epistemic dependency situations: the acquisition is done within an epistemic niche. Although epistemic dependence can threaten the truth-conduciveness of beliefs, this need not be the case if practical and procedural restrictions are carefully designed with the goal of truth-conduciveness in mind. The second research question With respect to the second question, the characteristics of knowledge about the legal domain should be established, given the viewpoint of legal epistemology. I ap p l i e d l e gal e p i st e molog y
Design and performance analysis of solid-propellant rocket motors using a simplified computer program

An analysis and a computer program are presented which represent a compromise between the more sophisticated programs using precise burning geometric relations and the textbook type of solutions. The program requires approximately 900 computer cards including a set of 20 input data cards required for a typical problem. The computer operating time for a single configuration is approximately 1 minute and 30 seconds on the IBM 360 computer. About l minute and l5 seconds of the time is compilation time so that additional configurations input at the same time require approximately 15 seconds each. The program uses approximately 11,000 words on the IBM 360. The program is written in FORTRAN 4 and is readily adaptable for use on a number of different computers: IBM 7044, IBM 7094, and Univac 1108.
Security and Privacy Controls in RFID Systems: Applied to EPCglobal Networks

La technologie Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) est un moyen d'automatiser l'identification et le stockage des informations dans des etiquettes RFID. Ces etiquettes peuvent etre fixees ou integrees a un objet a identifier et sont lues par un lecteur RFID. Electronic Product Code (EPC) Classe 1 Generation 2 (appele Gen2) est un exemple typique des etiquettes RFID passives. Il represente l'element cle d'une architecture RFID, nommee EPCglobal network. Ces etiquettes peuvent contenir plus d'informations qu'un simple identifiant, comme les donnees personnelles du porteur de l'etiquette. Par consequent, des protections sont necessaires pour proteger la vie privee du porteur. Dans cette these, je propose un controle des donnees relatives a la vie privee a deux niveaux de l'architecture EPCglobal, pour que seules les entites autorisees puissent recuperer ou modifier les donnees a caractere prive. L'objectif est d'assurer que l'echange de donnees depuis les etiquettes RFID vers les middleware et applications d'entreprise repond aux exigences de confidentialite, dans un environnement ou le controle de la vie privee est primordial, par exemple, les systemes de suivi de la sante a domicile. La premiere partie de la these est dediee a la protection des echanges de donnees entre les lecteurs et les etiquettes RFID passives. Je presente un protocole d'etablissement et de derivation de cles dans les systemes Gen2, appele KEDGEN2. Il traite les insuffisances du modele de securite du standard quant a l'acces a la memoire de l'etiquette. Le protocole a ete specifie en utilisant le langage HLPSL (High Level Protocol Specification Language) et des proprietes de securite (authentification mutuelle, forward secrecy et backward secrecy pour la persistance de la confidentialite) ont ete prouvees grâce a des techniques de model checking via l'outil CL-AtSe (Constraint-Logic based Attack Searcher). Le mecanisme de derivation de cles pseudo-aletaoires repose sur une adaptation du systeme de chiffrement Solitaire. Pour completer notre approche, la deuxieme partie de cette these ajoute un filtre au niveau des donnees collectees par l'intergiciel RFID (appele middleware). Ce composant se situe entre les lecteurs d'etiquettes et les bases de donnees applicatives. Il est en charge de collecter, filtrer et agreger des evenements issus d'environnements RFID heterogenes. Pour proteger ce composant des lectures malveillantes, l'approche que je propose est centree sur l'utilisateur, qui peut definir la politique de vie privee s'appliquant aux donnees agregees par le middleware. Elle integre (i) la mise en oeuvre d'une politique de vie privee sans interferer avec l'interface standard du middleware, (ii) l'expression des preferences de vie privee en utilisant le modele PrivOrBAC et (iii) la prise en compte des dimensions de declaration de l'objectif de la requete, de precision des resultats generes, et de consentement explicite de l'utilisateur. Un prototype a ete developpe pour illustrer la faisabilite de l'approche et a ete applique a l'infrastructure open-source Fosstrak.
Darwinian inheritance genetic learning method of neural networks under dynamic environments

Neural network and genetic algorithms are widely known as their superior adaptation capability by imitating mechanisms of a living thing. In this paper, we proposed the Darwinian inheritance genetic learning method, where each neural network is regarded as an individual learning ability, and genetic algorithms are applied as the evolutionary processes in the population of such an individual. Especially, even if the dataset of teaching data is changed, this proposed method can find a good individual, which includes the network structures, the connection weights, and the learning parameters without starting to learn the new data set. In this paper, although the given training data set is subset of all training data, we show that our proposed method has the good performance of classification for all training data sets.
Indirect estimation and econometrics exams: how to live a round life

The use of Monte Carlo methods to generate exam data sets is nowadays a well-established practice among econometrics examiners all over the world. Its advantages are well known: providing each student a different data set ensures that estimates are actually computed individually, rather than copied from someone sitting nearby. The method however has a major fault: initial "random errors", such as mistakes in downloading the assigned dataset, might generate downward bias in student evaluation. We propose a set of calibration algorithms, typical of indirect estimation methods, that solve the issue of initial "random errors" and reduce evaluation bias. Ensuring round initial estimates of the parameters for each individual data set, our calibration procedures allow the students to determine if they have started the exam correctly. When initial estimates are not round numbers, this random error in the initial stage of the exam can be corrected for immediately, thus reducing evaluation bias. The procedure offers the further advantage of rounding markers’ life by allowing them to check round numbers answers only, rather than lists of numbers with many decimal digits.
An automatic indexing for thai text retrieval

The Thai writing system has no punctuation to indicate words or sentences. This makes difficult both in human and machine learning to detect the word boundaries. Therefore, text segmentation is a prerequisite for any machine studies including information retrieval. Generally, previous works can be classified into purely dictionary, morphological rules, and statistical approaches. Most of the segmentation research had been done under machine translation; however, the current success is only in the word-by-word translation. Furthermore, the major task in the information retrieval which is identifying keywords, is done by experts. This research establishes the tasks of the information retrieval and test data sets for both information retrieval and segmentation algorithms. The indexing techniques, n-gram, probabilistic word-based, and morphological rules approaches for Thai text were investigated. This research showed that the most prominent approach, n-gram, did not contribute to Thai text due to the index size. The basic morphologies and simple term weights achieved a more desirable retrieval effectiveness. The most striking term weighting system was the augmented term frequencies. It re-weighted the normal term frequencies to lie between 0.5 and 1. The results of the morphological rules, on the other hand, were achieved only in the phoneme level and still miss word-level semantics. A new technique in acquiring lexicons, BayNet, was presented. The motivation of the BayNet resembles the human learning process. In this new technique, the basic morphologies were used at the first stage, then statistics were obtained for combining the basic monosyllables. The well-known Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle of Bayesian Networks was exploited in acquiring the lexicon structures. Results of this thesis provided insight for the Thai information retrieval systems. The results had shown that perfect segmentation is not a mandatory process. Thai writing system posed a unique problem in the area of information retrieval due to the characteristics of the word formations and word usage. Although the new technique mentioned above did not provide dramatically greater results than dictionary based approach, it provided extensive ideas in obtaining the new lexicons without using a dictionary as a table lookup or word patterns for learning.
A survey of parallel multigrid algorithms

A typical multigrid algorithm applied to well-behaved linear-elliptic partial-differential equations (PDEs) is described. Criteria for designing and evaluating parallel algorithms are presented. Before evaluating the performance of some parallel multigrid algorithms, consideration is given to some theoretical complexity results for solving PDEs in parallel and for executing the multigrid algorithm. The effect of mapping and load imbalance on the partial efficiency of the algorithm is studied.
Graph theoretic foundations of program slicing and integration

This paper generalizes program slicing algorithms originally deﬁned over representations of programsto operate over directed graphs. Doing so provides a uniform framework to model Weiser’s and Ottenstein& Ottenstein’s approaches to program slicing as abstract mathematical operations transparent of anyconcerns of a program’s structure or its semantics. This transparency helps us in a) deriving calculationalstyle proofs of algebraic properties of slices, b) making more general assertions about these properties thanthose previously established, and c) generalizing Weiser’s slicing criterion to allow union of statements.The two program integration algorithms due to Reps and Horwitz, Prins, & Reps use programslicing as an elementary operation and are generalized to integrate directed graphs. These algorithmscan therefore be used to integrate versions of any artifact that may be represented as graphs, for instanceversions of speciﬁcation and design of software systems.