Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reconfigurable Hardware for Function Evaluation and LDPC Coding MPhil / PhD Transfer Report

Three main topics are presented in this report: function evaluation, Gaussian noise generation, and Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) code encoding. The function evaluator uses first order polynomials to approximate elementary or special purpose functions. The novelty of our approach is the use of non-uniform segments, in which the segment sizes can be adjusted to conform to the nonlinearities for the function to be approximated. A simple cascade of AND and OR gates can be used to rapidly calculate the segment addresses for a given input. Scaling factors are used to deal with large polynomial coefficients, trading precision with range. Two functions are used for case studies: √ − ln(x) and cos(2πx). Results indicate significant improvements of our non-uniform segment approach over the traditional uniform approach, especially for functions with high non-linearities. The hardware Gaussian noise generator is designed to facilitate channel code simulations involving very large numbers of samples. Our non-uniform segment function evaluator is used to compute the trigonometric and logarithmic functions needed for the generation of the noise samples. The design occupies approximately 10% of a Xilinx Virtex-II XC2V4000-6 chip and 90% of a Xilinx Spartan-IIE XC2S300E-7, and can produce 133 million samples per second. Various statistical tests as well as application to LDPC decoding are used to confirm the quality of the noise samples. Finally, an efficient hardware encoder for irregular LDPC codes is developed. It is based on Richardson and Urbanke’s encoding algorithm and takes up 3% of a Xilinx Virtex-II XC2V40006 device. It runs at 133MHz and is capable of a throughput of 10 million bits per second. The codewords generated from our encoder are verified against our software model for correctness.
Association between admission temperature and mortality and major morbidity in preterm infants born at fewer than 33 weeks' gestation.

IMPORTANCE Neonatal hypothermia has been associated with higher mortality and morbidity; therefore, thermal control following delivery is an essential part of neonatal care. Identifying the ideal body temperature in preterm neonates in the first few hours of life may be helpful to reduce the risk for adverse outcomes. OBJECTIVES To examine the association between admission temperature and neonatal outcomes and estimate the admission temperature associated with lowest rates of adverse outcomes in preterm infants born at fewer than 33 weeks' gestation. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Retrospective observational study at 29 neonatal intensive care units in the Canadian Neonatal Network. Participants included 9833 inborn infants born at fewer than 33 weeks' gestation who were admitted between January 1, 2010, and December 31, 2012. EXPOSURE Axillary or rectal body temperature recorded at admission. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The primary outcome was a composite adverse outcome defined as mortality or any of the following: severe neurological injury, severe retinopathy of prematurity, necrotizing enterocolitis, bronchopulmonary dysplasia, or nosocomial infection. The relationships between admission temperature and the composite outcome as well as between admission temperature and the components of the composite outcome were evaluated using multivariable analyses. RESULTS Admission temperatures of the 9833 neonates were distributed as follows: lower than 34.5°C (1%); 34.5°C to 34.9°C (1%); 35.0°C to 35.4°C (3%); 35.5°C to 35.9°C (7%); 36.0°C to 36.4°C (24%); 36.5°C to 36.9°C (38%); 37.0°C to 37.4°C (19%); 37.5°C to 37.9°C (5%); and 38.0°C or higher (2%). After adjustment for maternal and infant characteristics, the rates of the composite outcome, severe neurological injury, severe retinopathy of prematurity, necrotizing enterocolitis, bronchopulmonary dysplasia, and nosocomial infection had a U-shaped relationship with admission temperature (α > 0 [P < .05]). The admission temperature at which the rate of the composite outcome was lowest was 36.8°C (95% CI, 36.7°C-37.0°C). Rates of severe neurological injury, severe retinopathy of prematurity, necrotizing enterocolitis (95% CI, 36.3°C-36.7°C), bronchopulmonary dysplasia, and nosocomial infection (95% CI, 36.9°C-37.3°C) were lowest at admission temperatures ranging from 36.5°C to 37.2°C. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE The relationship between admission temperature and adverse neonatal outcomes was U-shaped. The lowest rates of adverse outcomes were associated with admission temperatures between 36.5°C and 37.2°C.
Study of Quality of Life in Traumatic Brain Injury

Abstract Objective To assess quality of life (QOL) in individuals with mild and moderate traumatic brain injury (TBI) and their relationship with demographic, posttraumatic insomnia, and injury-related factors. Method The present study was a cross-sectional study conducted at Sawai Man Singh Medical College and group of hospitals over a period of 6 months from January 2013 to June 2013. The groups studied consists of 204 patients of mild and moderate TBI between 14 days and 1 year postinjury and equal number of controls by recruiting close relatives of the patients for comparison. Patients were assessed on semistructured sociodemographic proforma along with WHOQOL BREF, insomnia severity index, and GCS to assess QOL, insomnia, and severity of TBI, respectively. Result The number of participants included was 204. Mean age was 33.34 years. QOL was found impaired in all four domains of patients with TBI as compared with control group. The most unsatisfying domain among all was environmental health. None of the sociodemographic variables were associated with impaired QOL in TBI except duration and severity of head injury. Patients with longer duration (time since injury) of TBI and higher GCS had better QOL. Patients with insomnia had significantly poor QOL compared with those with TBI without insomnia. Conclusion QOL is an important aspect to be considered while management of TBI is performed especially during follow-ups. Impact of severity and the duration of injury with associated sleep problems have significant bearing on QOL.
Incremental deductive & inductive reasoning for SAT-based bounded model checking

Bounded model checking (BMC) based on Boolean satisfiability (SAT) methods has recently gained popularity as a viable alternative to BDD-based techniques for verifying large designs. This work proposes a number of conceptually simple, but extremely effective, optimizations for enhancing the performance of SAT-based BMC flows. The key ideas include: (1) a novel idea to combine SAT-based inductive reasoning and BMC; (2) clever orchestration of variable ordering and learned information in an incremental framework for BMC; and (3) BMC-specific ordering strategies for the SAT solver. Our experiments, conducted on a wide range of industrial designs, show that the proposed optimizations consistently provide between 1-2 orders of magnitude speedup and can be extremely useful in enhancing the efficacy of typical SAT-BMC tools.
A Benchmark for Context Data Management in Mobile Applications

Over the last few years, computational power, storage capacity, and sensing capabilities of mobile devices have significantly improved. As a consequence, they have undergone a rapid development from pure telecommunication devices to small and ubiquitous computing platforms. Most importantly, these devices are able to host context-aware applications, i.e., applications that are automatically adjusted to the current context of their user. This, in turn, requires sensing support on the device, the possibility to store context information, and to efficiently access this context information for the automated adaptation of applications. In this paper, we introduce a benchmark for context management in mobile context-aware applications. We present in detail the design and setup of the benchmark, based on an eHealth use case. The benchmark evaluation considers context queries on Android Nexus Oe cell phones and compares the performance of different settings including relational and object-oriented databases on the mobile device, and an RDF triple store on a stationary computer. The results show significant differences in the settings that have been evaluated and are thus valuable indicators for database selection and system design for mobile context-aware applications.
A 40 Gbps Micro-Ring Modulator Driver Implemented in a SiGe BiCMOS Technology

This paper presents a 40 Gbps micro-ring modulator driver IC implemented in a 130nm SiGe BiCMOS technology providing a fT,max of 250GHz. The proposed bandwidth-optimized driver IC achieves 2Vppd output signal swing required for the integrated high-impedance silicon photonics ring modulator or 1Vppd when differentially terminated with 100Ω. The complete driver including input termination and biasing consumes 90mW operated from a single 2:5V power supply. The inductor-less driver architecture exploits a current density optimized cascode topology with capacitive degeneration to improve both, the overall bandwidth and the output voltage swing. The driver core occupies only 0.04mm2. Small-signal measurements show a differential gain of 16dB with a -3dB bandwidth of 33GHz and a return loss of -15dB at 33GHz. This design represents one of the fastest micro-ring modulator drivers with FOM of 2.25 pJ/(bit×⌉Vppd) above 25 Gbps.
HMGB1 and Histones Play a Significant Role in Inducing Systemic Inflammation and Multiple Organ Dysfunctions in Severe Acute Pancreatitis

Severe acute pancreatitis (SAP) starts as a local inflammation of pancreatic tissue that induces the development of multiple extrapancreatic organs dysfunction; however, the underlying mechanisms are still not clear. Ischemia-reperfusion, circulating inflammatory cytokines, and possible bile cytokines significantly contribute to gut mucosal injury and intestinal bacterial translocation (BT) during SAP. Circulating HMGB1 level is significantly increased in SAP patients and HMGB1 is an important factor that mediates (at least partly) gut BT during SAP. Gut BT plays a critical role in triggering/inducing systemic inflammation/sepsis in critical illness, and profound systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) can lead to multiple organ dysfunction syndrome (MODS) during SAP, and systemic inflammation with multiorgan dysfunction is the cause of death in experimental SAP. Therefore, HMGB1 is an important factor that links gut BT and systemic inflammation. Furthermore, HMGB1 significantly contributes to multiple organ injuries. The SAP patients also have significantly increased circulating histones and cell-free DNAs levels, which can reflect the disease severity and contribute to multiple organ injuries in SAP. Hepatic Kupffer cells (KCs) are the predominant source of circulating inflammatory cytokines in SAP, and new evidence indicates that hepatocyte is another important source of circulating HMGB1 in SAP; therefore, treating the liver injury is important in SAP.
Using Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis to Identify Web User Segments

Web usage mining techniques are often used to identify user access patterns. However, to understand the factors that lead to common navigational patterns, it is necessary to develop techniques that can automatically characterize the underlying tasks and to map these tasks to user segments. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) has been successfully applied in a variety of applications such as information retrieval and filtering, text learning, and co-citation analysis. In this paper, we use a probabilistic variant of LSA to analyze Web usage data and identify the latent factors which explain visitor segments based on their navigational behavior. Our experiments, performed on real usage data, show that this approach can successfully distinguish between different types of Web user segments according to the types of tasks performed by these users.
A robust wavelet-based watermarking scheme for copyright protection of digital images

The recent advancement in the digital multimedia technologies has presented many facilities in the transmission, reproduction and manipulation of digital images. Nevertheless, the advancement has also brought about problems such as copyright protection for content providers. Digital watermarking is one of the proposed solutions for copyright protection of digital images. A wide variety of watermarking techniques have been proposed by researchers for the copyright protection of digital images. This paper presents a novel robust invisible watermarking scheme for embedding and extracting a digital watermark in an image to protect its copyrights. The invisible insertion of the watermark image into the original image is performed in wavelet domain using Haar wavelet transform. A mask matrix is generated using the original image with the aid of MD5 algorithm and random matrix generation. The generated mask matrix is utilized in both embedding and extraction processes. The watermark is extracted by computing the relationship degrees between the mask matrix and the watermark embedded wavelet coefficients. The results of the experimentation using attacks demonstrate the robustness and efficacy of the proposed watermarking scheme. Ownership proof could be established under various hostile attacks.
Fast and Secure Initial Access Authentication Protocol for Wireless LANs

Nowadays there is widespread use of WLAN enabled devices, so it is equally important to have efficient initial link setup mechanism. In this paper a fast access authentication process is implemented which is faster than current 802.11i. Through experiments, it is observed that the inefficiency of 802.11i is due to its design from the framework perspective which introduces too many messages. Due to more number of round-trip messages in 802.11i authentication delay is intolerable under some scenarios. To overcome this, an efficient initial access authentication protocol FLAP is proposed which introduces two round-trip messages with authentications and key distribution. Proposed FLAP protocol scheme is more secure than 4-way handshake protocol. Simulations are conducted using different scenarios like Authentication delay, Throughput, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), Packet Drops are measured for different scenarios and compared between the 802.11i and FLAP protocol. The results show that the FLAP is more advantageous when WLAN gets crowded.
Running head : SPATIAL MEMORY Spatial Memory Following Temporal Lobe Resection

The present study sought a clearer understanding of spatial memory function consequent to temporal lobe resection, and, in particular, of spatial memory function with respect to twoas well as three-dimensional frames of reference. Relative to a group of 15 control participants, a group of 15 epilepsy patients with right temporal resections demonstrated deficits of memory for locations in a twodimensional display. A group of 13 epilepsy patients with left temporal resections did not demonstrate such deficits. The right and the left resection groups both demonstrated deficits of memory for itemlocation relationships in a two-dimensional display. The right but not the left resection group demonstrated deficits of memory for item-location relationships in a three-dimensional display. The differing results that were observed for item-location relationships in twoand three-dimensional displays were attributed to differences in the way item information is bound with location information concerning twoand three-dimensional domains.
Military supply chain management strategies under demand disruption

This research examines the incentive strategy of defense supply chain when using contracted supplier to react to emergent affairs. We model the channel member as between a supplier and a defense purchaser, and treat the demand as being linear in delivery time. We use this analysis to show that incentive is very important to delivery in time, and the purchaser must adjust the strategy when demand-time coefficient changed because of emergent affairs.
State transitions reveal the dynamics and flexibility of the photosynthetic apparatus

The chloroplast‐based photosynthetic apparatus of plants and algae associates various redox cofactors and pigments with ∼70 polypeptides to form five major transmembrane protein complexes. Among these are two photosystems that have distinct light absorption properties but work in series to produce reducing equivalents aimed at the fixation of atmospheric carbon. A short term chromatic adaptation known as ‘State transitions’ was discovered thirty years ago that allows photosynthetic organisms to adapt to changes in light quality and intensity which would otherwise compromise the efficiency of photosynthetic energy conversion. A two‐decade research effort has finally unraveled the major aspects of the molecular mechanism responsible for State transitions, and their physiological significance has been revisited. This review describes how a—still elusive—regulatory kinase senses the physiological state of the photosynthetic cell and triggers an extensive supramolecular reorganization of the photosynthetic membranes. The resulting picture of the photosynthetic apparatus is that of a highly flexible energy convertor that adapts to the ever‐changing intracellular demand for ATP and/or reducing power.
Das Vibrissen-System der Nager als Modell zur Erforschung der Funktion des Motorkortex

Zusammenfassung Um die Natur von Motorkortexsignalen zu verstehen, müssen der innere Aufbau und die afferenten Verbindungen von sog. zentralen Mustergeneratoren (Engl. central pattern generators, CPGs) aufgeklärt werden - spezialisierte, sub-kortikale Netzwerke, welche die afferenten Motorkortexsignale in detaillierte Muskelaktivierungen übersetzen. Diskontinuitäten in der Bewegungskarte des Motorkortex könnten Fortschritte in dieser Frage erbringen, da sie erlauben, CPGs vergleichend zu untersuchen, die ein und dieselben Muskeln zum Zwecke ganz unterschiedlicher Bewegungen aktivieren. Das Vibrissen-Motorsystem der Ratte ist solch ein diskontinuierliches, modulares System. Benachbarte kortikale Areale sind für spezielle Bewegungen der Tasthaare verantwortlich. Wir versuchen aufzuzeigen, dass die Modularität dieses Systems und die gute Zugänglichkeit seiner Elemente einen vielversprechenden Zugang anbieten, welcher wesentlich zum Verständnis der Interaktionen zwischen Motorkortex und CPGs sowohl auf der zellulären, als auch auf der Netzwerkebene beitragen könnte. Solche Einsichten werden benötigt, um in Zukunft auch die kontinuierlicher organisierten Zeige- und Greifbewegungen von Primaten besser zu verstehen.
Emotion control of player characters: Creating an emotionally responsive game

The gaming industry is diligently working to find ways to emotionally immerse players in games. Their goal is to evoke emotions in the player, such as empathy, to make the player feel more genuinely involved in the game experience. A large body of work, both theoretical and physical, has been done in this regard. However, in order to have an emotionally immersive game, the player and the game must be involved in an emotion dialogue. It must both evoke emotions (emotion output) and receive emotions (emotion input). To date, emotion input has been largely ignored by game designers, leaving games that “talk” emotionally at the player but do not “listen” to the player. This thesis explores emotion input by designing a game that prompts for and responds to player input of emotions to create a game that listens to the player emotionally. The hypothesis is that the capability to input emotions will create an emotionally responsive world that will facilitate player involvement and immersion.
Synthesizing life history theory with sexual selection: Toward a comprehensive model of alternative reproductive strategies

Abstract Del Giudice's model of sex-specific attachment patterns demonstrates the usefulness of infusing life history theory with principles of sexual selection. We believe a full synthesis between the two theories provides a foundation for a comprehensive model of alternative reproductive strategies. We extend Del Giudice's ideas based on our own program of research, focusing specifically on the importance of intrasexual competition and the individual phenotype during development.
Effects of transformational and shared leadership styles on employees’ perception of team effectiveness

Using 3 sets of multiple regression models, we examined the effectiveness of transformational and shared leadership styles in relation to team effectiveness, based on the perceptions of 424 employees of Korean financial and insurance firms. Transformational leadership is a vertical leadership style emanating from the formal leader of a team, whereas shared leadership is a distributed leadership style that emanates from the team members. We found that trans- formational leadership contributed to team output effectiveness, whereas shared leadership improved the team’s organizing and planning effectiveness. These findings imply that different styles of leadership contribute to different aspects of team effectiveness. We suggest that managers should collaborate more with team members and should pay attention to the fit between the leader’s behavior and the characteristics of the team output in order to promote overall team effectiveness.
Heart Rate Variability in healthy people compared with patients with Congestive Heart Failure

In this paper we have investigated the differences of Heart Rate Variability (HRV) features between normal subjects and patients suffering from Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) at several levels of NYHA scale. We analyzed 1914.4 hours of ECG of 83 patients of which 54 normal and 29 suffering from CHF with NYHA I, II, III, extracted by public databases. Following international guidelines, we computed time and frequency features of HRV. The measured features have been statistically analyzed per each NHYA class. Finally, features correlation matrix for each class has been studied. The results suggest that differences exist between HRV features of normal subjects and patients suffering from CHF. These differences seems to be related to the severity of the pathology. Finally, we observe that also the correlation matrix changes according to the severity of NYHA.
Logging Solutions to Mitigate Risks Associated with Threats in Infrastructure as a Service Cloud

Cloud computing offers computational resources such as processing, networking, and storage to customers. However, the cloud also brings with it security concerns which affect both cloud consumers and providers. The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) define the security concerns as the seven main threats. This paper investigates how threat number one (malicious activities performed in consumers' virtual machines/VMs) can affect the security of both consumers and providers. It proposes logging solutions to mitigate risks associated with this threat. We systematically design and implement a prototype of the proposed logging solutions in an IaaS to record the history of customer VM's files. The proposed system can be modified in order to record VMs' process behaviour log files. These log files can assist in identifying malicious activities (spamming) performed in the VMs as an example of how the proposed solutions benefits the provider side. The proposed system can record the log files while having a smaller trusted computing base compared to previous work. Thus, the logging solutions in this paper can assist in mitigating risks associated with the CSA threats to benefit consumers and providers.