Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pre- and Post-Fabrication Architecture Exploration for Partially Reconfigurable VLIW Processors

Modern application specific instruction-set processors (ASIPs) face the demanding task of delivering high performance for a wide range of applications. For enhancing the performance, architectural features e.g. pipelining, VLIW etc are often employed in ASIPs, leading to high design complexity. Integrated ASIP design environments like templated-based approaches [1] and language- driven approaches [2][3] provide an answer to this growing design complexity. At the same time, increasing hardware design costs have motivated the processor designers to introduce high flexibility in the processor. Flexibility, in its most effective form, can be introduced to the ASIP by coupling a re-configurable unit to the base processor. Due to its obvious benefits, several re-configurable ASIPs (rASIPs) have been designed in the recent years. These rASIP designs lacked a generic flow from high-level specification, resulting into intuitive design decisions and hard-to-retarget processor design tools. Although a template-based approach for rASIP design is existent, a clear design methodology especially for the pre-fabrication architecture exploration is not present. In order to address this issue, a high-level specification and design methodology for partially re-configurable VLIW processors is proposed in this paper. To show the benefit of this approach a commercial VLIW processor is used as the base architecture and two domains of applications are studied for potential performance gain.
Child Adjustment to Parental Combat Deployment: Risk and Resilience Models

Abstract : Parental deployment can disrupt the care children receive both as a result of deployment-related separation and the potentially destabilizing impact of deployment on the remaining caregiver and daily routines. This study collaboration is between civilian scientists and the behavioral health MEDDAC of the 10th Mountain Light Infantry Division. The project entails the assessment of parents (N=400) whose spouse/partner is currently deployed and has a child between the ages of 3 and 7. The objectives of this study are as follows: (1) to examine the role of caregiver behaviors in mitigating or exacerbating the risk associated with parental deployment in the prediction of child adaptation, (2) to identify and measure developmentally salient skills as indicators of current adaptation among children during preschool and early childhood, and (3) to delineate whether particular groups of children are at greater risk or demonstrate greater resilience in response to parental deployment. Current progress includes successful IRB exemption and survey development and deployment. Based on feedback from Fort Drum, we created an internet-based version of the survey to facilitate access to participants. Data collection has begun (n=161) and continues at this time. Initial data review indicates preliminary support for our ability to profile at-risk children and parents.
Visual Perception and Reading Dysfunction

Eighty-seven children in school grades one through six with severe language arts and specific reading performance deficits were evaluated for visual and visual-perceptual development. Referrals were made for perceptual dysfunction, refractive or optometric correction, suspicion of neurologic deficit, emotional and psychologic involvement, and miscellaneous physical anomalies. There were a preponderance of males in the sample, and almost 50 per cent of the sample had significant visual-perceptual or visual dysfunctions judged severe enough to impede learning. Knowledge of visual-perceptual deficits could lead to correction and compensation through therapy and matching teaching methodology designed to meet the developmental needs of the child.
El nexo de desarrollo entre convergencia y cohesión: retos para la ampliación europea en el espacio económico global. The development connection between convergence and cohesion: challenges for european expansion in the global economic sphere

The article differentiates between convergence, which originates in the processes of integration, and cohesion, much more complex and systematic. The paths of convergence do not necessarily have to contribute, and they can even reject, socioeconomic cohesion. The dynamic of convergence and cohesion is analysed from two different conceptual focuses: economic geography and the endogenous nature of economic profit. What has occurred in the EU in the last two decades underscores the simultaneous existence of dual results regarding convergence and cohesion, which are not transitory and which, in the context of today’s technological changes, require keeping in mind that greater cohesion is an integral part of global growth.
Gulf of Mexico oil spill impact on beach soil: UWB radars-based approach

Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010 has generated deep impact on the beach soil. Microwave emission and backscattering of the beach soil depend on its dielectric property which exhibits dispersion and absorption and is affected by the oil, salt, and moisture content. In this paper, we apply Ultra-WideBand (UWB) radars sensor network to perform the beach soil dielectric property studies due to the oil spill. Data were collected from different beaches in New Orleans. Some beaches were contaminated by oil spill; and some beaches were clean. Extensive data were collected on different beaches based on UWB radars. We obtained the soil reflectivity kernel based on the sending chirps and received echoes for soil, and observed that oil spill has reduced the amplitude of reflectivity kernel.
Effects of Model Performances on Music Skill Acquisition and Overnight Memory Consolidation

This study was designed to investigate the extent to which the presentation of an auditory model prior to learning a novel melody affects performance during active practice and the overnight consolidation of procedural memory. During evening training sessions, 32 nonpianist musicians practiced a 13-note keyboard melody with their left (nondominant) hand in twelve 30-s practice intervals separated by 30-s rest intervals. Participants were instructed to play the sequence “as quickly, accurately, and evenly as possible. ” Approximately half the participants, prior to the first practice interval, listened to 10 repetitions of the target melody played at 552 tones per minute (half note = 138). All participants were tested on the target melody the following morning, approximately 12 hr after training, in three 30-s blocks separated by 30-s rest intervals. Performance was measured in terms of the mean number of correct key presses per 30-s block (CKP/B). Consistent with previous research, participants made considerable improvements in CKP/B during the evening training sessions and between the end of training and the morning test sessions. Learners who listened to the model made significantly larger gains in performance during training and between the end of training and test than did those who did not hear the model.
Employee involvement, technology and job tasks

Using new job requirements data for Britain I show that there has been a rise in various forms of communication tasks: influencing and literacy tasks have grown especially fast, as have self-planning tasks. External communication tasks, and numerical tasks have also become more important, but physical tasks have largely remained unchanged. Although the classification of tasks as programmable or otherwise is found to be problematic, computer use accounts for much of the changed use of generic skills. Going beyond the technology, I investigate whether organisational changes requiring greater employee involvement explain some of the new skill requirements. Using either industry or occupation panel analyses, I find that employee involvement raises the sorts of generic skills that human resource management models predict, in particular three categories of communication skills and self-planning skills. These effects are found to be independent of the effect of computers on generic skills.
Estimation of Stand Type Parameters and Land Cover Using Landsat-7 ETM Image: A Case Study from Turkey

Remote sensing has been considered a low-cost, large-area coverage forest information resource ideally suited to broad-scale forest inventory objectives. The objective of this study is to determine stand type parameters such as crown closure, development stage and stand types, and land cover obtained from Landsat 7 ETM image and forest cover type map (stand type map). The research also focuses on classifying and mapping the stand parameters with the spatial analysis functions of GIS. In the study, stand parameters determined by forest cover type map and remote sensing methods were compared and contrasted to evaluate the potential use of the remote sensing methods. The result showed that development stage were estimated with Landsat 7 ETM image using supervised classification with a 0.89 kappa statistic value and 92% overall accuracy assessments. Among the features, development stages were the most successfully classified stand parameters in classification process. According to the spatial accuracy assessment results, development stages also had the highest accuracy of 72.2%. As can be seen in the results, spatial accuracy is lower than classification accuracy. Stand type had the lowest accuracy of 32.8. In conclusion, it could be stated that development stages, crown closure and land cover could be determined at an acceptable level using Landsat 7 ETM image. However, Landsat 7 ETM image do not provide means to map and monitor minor vegetation communities and stand types at stand level due to low spatial resolution. High resolution satellite images could be used either alone or with field survey data.
Development of a publishing framework for living open access textbooks

We are suggesting a framework for open access publishing of comprehensive, elaborately structured digital textbooks, potentially enriched by extensive non-textual data. The framework will comprise of a software toolbox containing a collaborative authoring platform, manuscript workflow system, tools for editorial work, presentation platform, updating workflow, interfaces for dissemination and long-term preservation. In addition to the software toolbox itself, guidelines and standards for all aspects of digital textbook publishing, including peer review, metadata and editorial procedures, legal issues as well as a business model will be developed, resulting in a best practice guide to digital textbook publishing. The software and workflows will not be developed from scratch, but build upon existing open-source software, using the example of a scientific textbook of hand surgery as its first use case. This paper introduces the project and gives a prospectus of the proposed framework.
Leveraging Protocol Knowledge in Slack Matching

Stalls, due to mis-matches in communication rates, are a major performance obstacle in pipelined circuits. If the rate of data production is faster than the rate of consumption, the resulting design performs slower than when the communication rate is matched. This can be remedied by inserting pipeline buffers (to temporarily hold data), allowing the producer to proceed if the consumer is not ready to accept data. The problem of deciding which channels need these buffers (and how many) for an arbitrary communication profile is called the slack matching problem; the optimal solution to this problem has been shown to be NP-complete. In this paper, we present a heuristic that uses knowledge of the communication protocol to explicitly model these bottlenecks, and an iterative algorithm to progressively remove these bottlenecks by inserting buffers. We apply this algorithm to asynchronous circuits, and show that it naturally handles large designs with arbitrarily cyclic and acyclic topologies, which exhibit various types of control choice. The heuristic is efficient, achieving linear time complexity in practice, and produces solutions that (a) achieve up to 60% performance speedup on large media processing kernels, and (b) can either be verified to be optimal, or the approximation margin can be bounded
Starting with Ubicomp: using the senseboard to introduce computing

In this paper, we describe a new undergraduate module for novice students conducted entirely through distance learning: My Digital Life (TU100). The module has been designed to lower the barriers to creating programs that interact with the world; TU100's materials have been designed to excite, encourage, reassure and support learners who explore the novel topic of ubiquitous computing through playful experimentation. It introduces the fundamentals of computing by giving students the capability for programming a device, the SenseBoard, which has built-in input/output and sensors. Programming is done in Sense, an extension of Scratch, which scaffolds programming and reduces the syntax burden. TU100 has taken inspiration from childhood learning and commercial product design to produce compelling, yet academically rigorous study materials.
Software process recovery using Recovered Unified Process Views

The development process for a given software system is a combination of an idealized, prescribed model and a messy set of ad hoc practices. To some degree, process compliance can be enforced by supporting tools that require various steps be followed in order; however, this approach is often perceived as heavyweight and inflexible by developers, who generally prefer that tools support their desired work habits rather than limit their choices. An alternative approach to monitoring process compliance is to instrument the various tools and repositories that developers use — such as version control systems, bug-trackers, and mailing-list archives — and to build models of the de facto development process through observation, analysis, and inference. In this paper, we present a technique for recovering a project's software development processes from a variety of existing artifacts. We first apply unsupervised and supervised techniques — including word-bags, topic analysis, summary statistics, and Bayesian classifiers — to annotate software artifacts by related topics, maintenance types, and non-functional requirements. We map the analysis results onto a time-line based view of the Unified Process development model, which we call Recovered Unified Process Views. We demonstrate our approach for extracting these process views on two case studies: FreeBSD and SQLite.
Multi-Level Verification of Clinical Protocols

In the medical domain, clinical practice guidelines and protocols build a commonly accepted way to improve patient health care. During the last years various approaches have been presented to support the computerization of such guidelines and protocols. However, the verification of clinical protocols has not become an extensive research topic yet. In this paper we will present a partial and domain-specific verification approach to identify particular anomalies in protocols. Our approach is oriented on a plan-representation language of clinical protocols given as temporal, skeletal plans, called Asbru. Asbru provides the necessary hierarchical structure and task-specific knowledge roles, which are needed to divide the whole verification process in subtasks. Our verification approach examines three levels of a plan: the plan itself, all its knowledge roles and all its subplans. The final aim is to arrive at legal or meaningful plans, instead of complete or totally correct plans.
Thrombotic stroke and myocardial infarction with hormonal contraception.

BACKGROUND Although several studies have assessed the risk of venous thromboembolism with newer hormonal contraception, few have examined thrombotic stroke and myocardial infarction, and results have been conflicting. METHODS In this 15-year Danish historical cohort study, we followed nonpregnant women, 15 to 49 years old, with no history of cardiovascular disease or cancer. Data on use of hormonal contraception, clinical end points, and potential confounders were obtained from four national registries. RESULTS A total of 1,626,158 women contributed 14,251,063 person-years of observation, during which 3311 thrombotic strokes (21.4 per 100,000 person-years) and 1725 myocardial infarctions (10.1 per 100,000 person-years) occurred. As compared with nonuse, current use of oral contraceptives that included ethinyl estradiol at a dose of 30 to 40 μg was associated with the following relative risks (and 95% confidence intervals) for thrombotic stroke and myocardial infarction, according to progestin type: norethindrone, 2.2 (1.5 to 3.2) and 2.3 (1.3 to 3.9); levonorgestrel, 1.7 (1.4 to 2.0) and 2.0 (1.6 to 2.5); norgestimate, 1.5 (1.2 to 1.9) and 1.3 (0.9 to 1.9); desogestrel, 2.2 (1.8 to 2.7) and 2.1 (1.5 to 2.8); gestodene, 1.8 (1.6 to 2.0) and 1.9 (1.6 to 2.3); and drospirenone, 1.6 (1.2 to 2.2) and 1.7 (1.0 to 2.6), respectively. With ethinyl estradiol at a dose of 20 μg, the corresponding relative risks according to progestin type were as follows: desogestrel, 1.5 (1.3 to 1.9) and 1.6 (1.1 to 2.1); gestodene, 1.7 (1.4 to 2.1) and 1.2 (0.8 to 1.9); and drospirenone, 0.9 (0.2 to 3.5) and 0.0. For transdermal patches, the corresponding relative risks were 3.2 (0.8 to 12.6) and 0.0, and for a vaginal ring, 2.5 (1.4 to 4.4) and 2.1 (0.7 to 6.5). CONCLUSIONS Although the absolute risks of thrombotic stroke and myocardial infarction associated with the use of hormonal contraception were low, the risk was increased by a factor of 0.9 to 1.7 with oral contraceptives that included ethinyl estradiol at a dose of 20 μg and by a factor of 1.3 to 2.3 with those that included ethinyl estradiol at a dose of 30 to 40 μg, with relatively small differences in risk according to progestin type. (Funded by the Danish Heart Association.).
Building consumer–brand relationship: A cross‐cultural experiential view

This research aims to develop a framework of consumer–brand relationship by taking an experiential view. In this article, the authors report a cross-cultural comparative study that was conducted on a sample of real consumers at coffee chain stores in Shanghai, China, and Taipei, Taiwan. The findings reveal that individual as well as shared experiences work through brand association, brand personality, brand attitude, and brand image to shape a consumer–brand relationship. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Built-In Self-Test for PEs of Coarse Grained Dynamically Reconfigurable Devices

This paper proposes a BIST (built-in self test) method for testing the PEs (processing elements) of multi-context based dynamically reconfigurable processor. We use flip-flops existing in PEs to constitute the test circuit which has the function of LFSR (linear feedback shift register) and MISR (multiple input signature register) as DFT (design for testability). This method can reduce test execution time while maintaining the high rate of fault coverage. Evaluation of the proposed method examined on DRP-I, a coarse grained dynamically reconfiguration processor developed by NEC electronics in 2002 is presented. The number of test configurations and test execution time can be reduced 59.0% and 89.3% respectively compared to a deterministic test with 4.3% area overhead
Productivity of Malaria Vectors from Different Habitat Types in the Western Kenya Highlands

Background Mosquito Larval Source Management (LSM) could be a valuable additional tool for integrated malaria vector control especially in areas with focal transmission like the highlands of western Kenya if it were not for the need to target all potential habitats at frequent intervals. The ability to determine the productivity of malaria vectors from identified habitats might be used to target LSM only at productive ones. Methods Each aquatic habitat within three highland sites in western Kenya was classified as natural swamp, cultivated swamp, river fringe, puddle, open drain or burrow pit. Three habitats of each type were selected in each site in order to study the weekly productivity of adult malaria vectors from February to May 2009 using a sweep-net and their habitat characteristics recorded. Results All surveyed habitat types produced adult malaria vectors. Mean adult productivity of Anopheles gambiae sensu lato in puddles (1.8/m2) was 11–900 times higher than in the other habitat types. However, puddles were the most unstable habitats having water at 43% of all sampling occasions and accounted for 5% of all habitats mapped in the study areas whereas open drains accounted for 72%. Densities of anopheline late instars larvae significantly increased with the presence of a biofilm but decreased with increasing surface area or when water was flowing. Taking stability and frequency of the habitat into account, puddles were still the most productive habitat types for malaria vectors but closely followed by open drains. Conclusion Even though productivity of An. gambiae s.l. was greatest in small and unstable habitats, estimation of their overall productivity in an area needs to consider the more stable habitats over time and their surface extension. Therefore, targeting only the highly productive habitats is unlikely to provide sufficient reduction in malaria vector densities.
Transcription Profiling of Epstein-Barr Virus Nuclear Antigen (EBNA)-1 Expressing Cells Suggests Targeting of Chromatin Remodeling Complexes

The Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) encoded nuclear antigen (EBNA)-1 regulates virus replication and transcription, and participates in the remodeling of the cellular environment that accompanies EBV induced B-cell immortalization and malignant transformation. The putative cellular targets of these effects of EBNA-1 are largely unknown. To address this issue we have profiled the transcriptional changes induced by short- and long-term expression of EBNA-1 in the EBV negative B-cell lymphoma BJAB. Three hundred and nineteen cellular genes were regulated in a conditional transfectant shortly after EBNA-1 induction while a ten fold higher number of genes was regulated upon continuous EBNA-1 expression. Promoter analysis of the differentially regulated genes demonstrated a significant enrichment of putative EBNA-1 binding sites suggesting that EBNA-1 may directly influence the transcription of a subset of genes. Gene ontology analysis of forty seven genes that were consistently regulated independently on the time of EBNA-1 expression revealed an unexpected enrichment of genes involved in the maintenance of chromatin architecture. The interaction network of the affected gene products suggests that EBNA-1 may promote a broad rearrangement of the cellular transcription landscape by altering the expression of key components of chromatin remodeling complexes.