Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
St-DRC: Stretchable DRAM Refresh Controller with No Parity-overhead Error Correction Scheme for Energy-efficient DNNs

We present a stretchable DRAM refresh control for energy-efficient processing of DNNs, namely St-DRC. We exploit the characteristic that the recognition accuracy of DNNs is insensitive to errors of insignificant bits. By replacing some insignificant bits with parity bits for the error-correction of significant bits, the St-DRC can protect the significant bits under stretched refresh periods. This significantly improves DRAM refresh energy without performance degradation of DNNs, applicable to both training and inference operations. Our simulation shows that in training, the St-DRC obtains 23%/12% DRAM energy savings for graphic/main memories, respectively. Further, the St-DRC accelerates the training speed by 0.43\sim 4.12%.
An Efficient Spare-Line Replacement Scheme to Enhance NVM Security

Non-volatile memories (NVMs) are vulnerable to serious threat due to the endurance variation. We identify a new type of malicious attack, called Uniform Address Attack (UAA), which performs uniform and sequential writes to each line of the whole memory, and wears out the weaker lines (lines with lower endurance) early. Experimental results show that the lifetime of NVMs under UAA is reduced to 4.1% of the ideal lifetime. To address such attack, we propose a spare-line replacement scheme called Max-WE (Maximize the Weak lines’ Endurance). By employing weak-priority and weak-strong-matching strategies for spare-line allocation, Max-WE is able to maximize the number of writes that the weakest lines can endure. Furthermore, Max-WE reduces the storage overhead of the mapping table by 85% through adopting a hybrid spare-line mapping scheme. Experimental results show that Max-WE can improve the lifetime by 9.5 X with the spare-line overhead and mapping overhead as 10% and 0.016% of the total space respectively.
Invited: Efficient System Architecture in the Era of Monolithic 3D: Dynamic Inter-Tier Interconnect and Processing-in-Memory

Emerging Monolithic Three-Dimensional (M3D) integration technology will not only provide improved circuit density through the high-bandwidth coupling of multiple vertically-stacked layers, but it can also provide new architectural opportunities for on-chip computation, memory, and communication that are beyond the capabilities of existing process and packaging technologies. For example, with massive parallel communication between heterogeneous memory and compute layers, existing processing-in-memory architectures can be optimized and expanded, developing into efficient and flexible near-data processors. Additionally, multiple tiers of interconnect can be dynamically leveraged to provide an efficient, scalable interconnect fabric that spans the three-dimensional system. This work explores some of the challenges and opportunities presented by M3D technology for emerging computer architectures, with focus on improving efficiency and increasing system flexibility.
TETRIS: A Streaming Accelerator for Physics-Limited 3D Plane-Wave UItrasound Imaging

High volume acquisition rates are imperative for medical ultrasound imaging applications, such as 3D elastography and 3D vector flow imaging. Unfortunately, despite recent algorithmic improvements, high-volume-rate imaging remains computationally infeasible on known platforms.In this paper, we propose TETRIS, a novel hardware accelerator for ultrasound beamforming that enables volume acquisition rates up to the physics limits of acoustic propagation delay. Through algorithmic and hardware optimizations, we enable a streaming system design outclassing previously proposed accelerators in performance while lowering hardware complexity and storage requirements. For a representative imaging task, our proposed system generates physics-limited 13,020 volumes per second in a 2. 5W power budget.CCS CONCEPTS• Hardware → Emerging architectures; 3D integrated circuits. ;
Switching the Post-translational Modification of Translation Elongation Factor EF-P

Tripeptides with two consecutive prolines are the shortest and most frequent sequences causing ribosome stalling. The bacterial translation elongation factor P (EF-P) relieves this arrest, allowing protein biosynthesis to continue. A seven amino acids long loop between beta-strands β3/β4 is crucial for EF-P function and modified at its tip by lysylation of lysine or rhamnosylation of arginine. Phylogenetic analyses unveiled an invariant proline in the -2 position of the modification site in EF-Ps that utilize lysine modifications such as Escherichia coli. Bacteria with the arginine modification like Pseudomonas putida on the contrary have selected against it. Focusing on the EF-Ps from these two model organisms we demonstrate the importance of the β3/β4 loop composition for functionalization by chemically distinct modifications. Ultimately, we show that only two amino acid changes in E. coli EF-P are needed for switching the modification strategy from lysylation to rhamnosylation.
Partition and Propagate: an Error Derivation Algorithm for the Design of Approximate Circuits

Inexact hardware design techniques have become popular in error-tolerant systems, where energy efficiency is a primary concern. Several techniques aim to identify circuit portions that can be discarded under an error constraint, but research on systematic methods to determine such error is still at an early stage. We herein illustrate a generic, scalable algorithm that determines the influence of each circuit gate on the final output. The algorithm first partitions the graph representing the circuit, then determines the error propagation model of the resulting subgraphs. When applied to existing approximate design frameworks, our solution improves their efficiency and result quality.
DHOOM: Reusing Design-for-Debug Hardware for Online Monitoring

Runtime verification employs dedicated hardware or software monitors to check whether program properties hold at runtime. However, these monitors often incur high area and performance overheads depending on whether they are implemented in hardware or software. In this work, we propose DHOOM, an architectural framework for runtime monitoring of program assertions, which exploits the combination of a reconfigurable fabric present alongside a processor core with the vestigial on-chip Design-for-Debug hardware. This combination of hardware features allows DHOOM to minimize the overall performance overhead of runtime verification, even when subject to a given area constraint. We present an algorithm for dynamically selecting an effective subset of assertion monitors that can be accommodated in the available programmable fabric, while instrumenting the remaining assertions in software. We show that our proposed strategy, while respecting area constraints, reduces the performance overhead of runtime verification by up to 32% when compared with a baseline of software-only monitors.
Approximate Integer and Floating-Point Dividers with Near-Zero Error Bias

We propose approximate dividers with near-zero error bias for both integer and floating-point numbers. The integer divider, INZeD, is designed using a novel, analytically deduced error-correction method in an approximate log based divider. The floating-point divider, FaNZeD, is based on a highly optimized mantissa divider that is inspired by INZeD. Both of the dividers are error configurable.Our results show that the INZeD dividers have error bias in the range of 0.01-4.4% with area-delay product improvement of $25\times - 95 \times $ and power improvement of $4.7 \times - 15 \times $ when compared to the accurate integer divider. Likewise, compared to IEEE single-precision floating-point divider, FaNZeD dividers offer up to $985 \times $ area-delay product and $77 \times $ power improvements with error bias in the range of $0.04 -2.2$%. Most importantly, using our FaNZeD dividers, floating-point arithmetic can be more resource-efficient than fixed-point arithmetic because most of the FaNZeD dividers are even smaller and have better area-delay product than the 8bit and 16-bit accurate integer dividers. Finally, our dividers show negligible effect on the output quality when evaluated with AlexNet and JPEG compression applications.
A strain of the bacterial symbiont Regiella insecticola protects aphids against parasitoids

Aphids commonly harbour facultative bacterial endosymbionts and may benefit from their presence through increased resistance to parasitoids. This has been demonstrated for Hamiltonella defensa and Serratia symbiotica, while a third common endosymbiont, Regiella insecticola, did not provide such protection. However, this symbiont was recently detected in a highly resistant clone of the peach-potato aphid, Myzus persicae, from Australia. To test if resistance was indeed conferred by the endosymbiont, we eliminated it from this clone with antibiotics, and we transferred it to two other clones of the same and one clone of a different aphid species (Aphis fabae). Exposing these lines to the parasitoid Aphidius colemani showed clearly that unlike other strains of this bacterium, this specific isolate of R. insecticola provides strong protection against parasitic wasps, suggesting that the ability to protect their host against natural enemies may evolve readily in multiple species of endosymbiotic bacteria.
Prevalence of carriage and characterisation of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in slaughter pigs and personnel exposed to pork carcasses.

In recent years, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has emerged in the community. There have been increasing reports of MRSA colonisation of pigs and pig farmers in Europe1 and North America. Multi-locus sequence typing (MLST) revealed widespread dissemination of a particular sequence type (ST) 398 among pigs in the Netherlands and subsequently the occurrence of this MRSA lineage has been reported in several other countries and animal species. Compelling microbiological and epidemiological evidence indicates that people who live or work on farms, especially pig farms, have an increased risk of colonisation or infection with ST398 MRSA. Human infection with ST398 MRSA has been reported in Hong Kong, but no information about occupation or pig contact was available. Porcine-associated MRSA ST398 typically harbours Staphylococcal cassette chromosome (SCC) mec type IV or V, but unlike most community MRSA, ST398 is increasingly multi-drug resistant. It appears that the genes for Panton-Valentine leucocidin toxin are rare in these strains. ST398 is non-typable by pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) using the restriction endonuclease sma1, which is commonly used in the investigation of clonality of staphylococcal strains. This study aimed to (1) determine the MRSA colonisation level of locally slaughtered pigs and whether this colonisation results in spread to persons Hong Kong Med J 2015;21(Suppl 7):S36-40 RFCID project number: 08070912
Cross-Database Models for the Classification of Dysarthria Presence

Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder that impacts verbal articulation and co-ordination, resulting in slow, slurred and imprecise speech. Automated classification of dysarthria subtypes and severities could provide a useful clinical tool in assessing the onset and progress in treatment. This study represents a pilot project to train models to detect the presence of dysarthria in continuous speech. Subsets of the Universal Access Research Dataset (UA-Speech) and the Atlanta Motor Speech Disorders Corpus (AMSDC) database were utilized in a cross-database training strategy (training on UA-Speech / testing on AMSDC) to distinguish speech with and without dysarthria. In addition to traditional spectral and prosodic features, the current study also includes features based on the Teager Energy Operator (TEO) and the glottal waveform. Baseline results on the UA-Speech dataset maximize wordand participant-level accuracies at 75.3% and 92.9% using prosodic features. However, the cross-training of UA-Speech tested on the AMSDC maximize wordand participant-level accuracies at 71.3% and 90% based on a TEO feature. The results of this pilot study reinforce consideration of dysarthria subtypes in cross-dataset training as well as highlight additional features that may be sensitive to the presence of dysarthria in continuous speech.
A None-Sparse Inference Accelerator that Distills and Reuses the Computation Redundancy in CNNs

Prior research on energy-efficient Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) inference accelerators mostly focus on exploiting the model sparsity, i.e., zero patterns in weight and activations, to reduce the on-chip storage and computation overhead. In this work, we found in addition to zero patterns, a larger group of repetitive patterns and values exists in the working-set of CNN inference task, which is defined as computation redundancy and induces unnecessary performance and storage overhead in CNN accelerators. Based on this observation, we proposed a redundancy-free architecture that detects and eliminates the repetitive computation and storage patterns in CNN for more efficient network inference. The architecture consists of two parts: the off-line parameter analyzer that extracts the repetitive patterns in the 3D tensor of parameters, and the dataflow accelerator. The proposed accelerator at first preprocesses the weight patterns and the dynamically generated activations, and then cache these intermediate results in special ${{\mathrm {P}}}^{2}$-cache banks for further usage in convolution or full-connection stage. It is evaluated in experiments that the proposed Cavoluche architecture removes up to 89% of the repetitive operations from the layer inference process and reduce 77% of on-chip storage space to store both redundancy-free weight and activations. It is seen in experiments that the implementation of Cavoluche outperforms the state-of-the-art mobile GPGPU in both performance and energy-efficiency. When compared to the latest sparsity base accelerators, Cavoluche also achieves better operation elimination effects.
Double immunohistochemical labeling technique applied to different types of cytokeratins in epithelial proliferations of the breast

The double labeling technique using peroxidase and alkaline phosphatase for immunohistochemistry is well known, but must be adapted according to the antibodies used, fixation, and technical conditions. The technique allows identification on one slide of two antigens that are localized in the same or different cells of the same lesion. The aim of this paper is to describe the adaptation of this technique to cytokeratins of normal mammary tissue and proliferative lesions of the breast.
What Can Game Transfer Phenomena Tell Us about the Impact of Highly Immersive Gaming Technologies?

The imminent introduction of highly immersive technologies for entertainment that bring exciting possibilities for the users also raises important questions regarding the impact on their well-being. Game Transfer Phenomena (GTP), a research approach focusing on understanding the psychosocial effects of video game playing by examining non-volitional phenomena (e.g., Altered sensorial perceptions, automatic mental processes, involuntary motoric activations and behaviours related to playing video games), suggests similarities between gamers' experiences reported after playing on conventional devices and side effects of highly immersive technologies (e.g., Head-up displays, highly realistic virtual environments). The aim of this paper is to discuss the challenges highly immersive technologies posit to the malleable human mind, taking into account not only the side-effects of the virtual immersion manifesting as physical symptoms, but also the psychosocial implications.
Quantitative Phase Imaging Camera With a Weak Diffuser

We introduce the quantitative phase imaging camera with a weak diffuser (QPICWD) as a practical realization of quantitative phase imaging (QPI) on standard microscope platforms. The QPICWD is a compact stand-alone camera which measures sample induced phase delay under low-coherence quasi-monochromatic illumination by examining the deformation of the speckle intensity pattern. By interpreting the speckle deformation with an ensemble average of the geometric flow, we can obtain the high-resolution distortion field by solving the transport of intensity equation (TIE). Since the phase measured by TIE is the generalized phase of the partially coherent image, instead of the phase of the measured object, we analyze the effect of illumination coherence and imaging numerical aperture (NA) on the accuracy of phase retrieval, revealing that the phase of the object can be reliably retrieved when the coherence parameter (the ratio of illumination NA to objective NA) of the Kohler illumination is between 0.3 and 0.5. We present several applications for the new design including nondestructive optical testing of microlens array with nanometric thickness and imaging of fixed and live HeLa cells. Since the designed QPI camera does not require any modification of the widely available bright-field microscope or additional accessories for its use, it is expected to be adopted by the broader biology and medical community.
INVITED: Building Robust Machine Learning Systems: Current Progress, Research Challenges, and Opportunities

Machine learning, in particular deep learning, is being used in almost all the aspects of life to facilitate humans, specifically in mobile and Internet of Things (IoT)-based applications. Due to its state-of-the-art performance, deep learning is also being employed in safety-critical applications, for instance, autonomous vehicles. Reliability and security are two of the key required characteristics for these applications because of the impact they can have on human’s life. Towards this, in this paper, we highlight the current progress, challenges and research opportunities in the domain of robust systems for machine learning-based applications.
Expression levels of inositol phosphorylceramide synthase modulate plant responses to biotic and abiotic stress in Arabidopsis thaliana

This research was undertaken to investigate the global role of the plant inositol phosphorylceramide synthase (IPCS), a non-mammalian enzyme previously shown to be associated with the pathogen response. RNA-Seq analyses demonstrated that over-expression of inositol phosphorylceramide synthase isoforms AtIPCS1, 2 or 3 in Arabidopsis thaliana resulted in the down-regulation of genes involved in plant response to pathogens. In addition, genes associated with the abiotic stress response to salinity, cold and drought were found to be similarly down-regulated. Detailed analyses of transgenic lines over-expressing AtIPCS1-3 at various levels revealed that the degree of down-regulation is specifically correlated with the level of IPCS expression. Singular enrichment analysis of these down-regulated genes showed that AtIPCS1-3 expression affects biological signaling pathways involved in plant response to biotic and abiotic stress. The up-regulation of genes involved in photosynthesis and lipid localization was also observed in the over-expressing lines.
Microbiome and Colorectal Carcinoma: Insights From Germ-Free and Conventional Animal Models

AbstractThe mammalian microbiota plays a crucial role in the pathogenesis of many diseases. Thanks to recent advances in metagenomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, microbiome composition and metabolic activity can now be studied in detail. Results obtained by such fascinating and provocative studies would be meaningless without considering the perspective of the whole organism. Our work using gnotobiology as the major tool to unravel the mechanisms of host-microbe interaction has demonstrated the crucial role of microbiota in the initiation and progression of inflammation-associated colorectal neoplasia. Carcinogenesis in the gut is driven by the presence of potentially harmful microbes or by lack of protective ones, by the production of carcinogens generated by microbes, and by the induction of inflammation and modulation of the immune system. Here, we review these mechanisms with special emphasis on those where gnotobiology has yielded important insights.
Contribution of women’s development army to maternal and child health in Ethiopia: a systematic review of evidence

Objective The aim of this review was to identify, appraise and synthesise studies that reported on the contribution of women’s development army (WDA) to maternal and child health development. Setting Studies conducted in Ethiopia 2010 onwards and published in English were considered. Data sources Evidence were searched in MEDLINE, CINAHL and EBSCOhost from 25 March to 10 April 2018. Eligibility criteria Both quantitative and qualitative studies assessing the contribution of WDA to maternal and child health were considered. Data extraction and synthesis Two independent reviewers have extracted data using pre-planned data extraction tool separately for each study design. Findings were synthesised using tables and narrative summary. Outcome Maternal and child health services; maternal and child mortality. Results Nine studies met the inclusion criteria and were used for synthesis. The results revealed that participation and membership in women’s development teams (WDTs) have a positive effect on minimising maternal death and improving child immunisation service use. Skilled delivery and antenatal care service use were higher in WDTs located within a radius of 2 km from health facilities. Women’s development teams were also the main sources of information for mothers to prepare themselves for birth and related complications. Moreover, well-established groups have strengthened the linkage of the health facility to the community so that delays in maternal health service use were minimised; health extension workers could effectively refer women to a health facility for birth and utilisation of skilled birth service was improved. Conclusion Voluntary health service intervention in Ethiopia has improved maternal and child health services’ outcome. A decrease in maternal deaths, increase in antenatal and delivery service use and improved child immunisation service uptake are attributable to this intervention. The linkage between community members and the primary healthcare system served as an effective and efficient mechanism to share information.
Early Corticosteroid Therapy for Mycoplasma pneumoniae Pneumonia Irrespective of Used Antibiotics in Children

Antibiotics’ effect on Mycoplasma pneumoniae (MP) infection still remains controversial. A prospective study of 257 children with MP pneumonia during a recent epidemic (2015–2016) was conducted. All MP pneumonia patients were treated with corticosteroids within 24–36 h after admission. Initially, oral prednisolone (1 mg/kg) or intravenous methylprednisolone (IVMP; 1–2 mg/kg) was administered for mild pneumonia patients, and IVMP (5–10 mg/kg/day) for severe pneumonia patients. If patients showed a persistent fever for 36–48 h or disease progression, additive IVMP (5 mg/kg or 10 mg/kg) was given. Thirty-three percent of patients received only a broad-spectrum antibiotic without a macrolide. The mean age and the male-to-female ratio was 5.6 ± 3.1 years and 1:1, respectively. Seventy-four percent of patients showed immediate defervescence within 24 h, and 96% of patients showed defervescence within 72 h with improvements in clinical symptoms. Three percent of patients (8/257) who received additive IVMP also showed clinical improvement within 48 h without adverse reactions. There were no clinical or laboratory differences between patients treated with a macrolide (n = 172) and without (n = 85). Early corticosteroid therapy might reduce disease morbidity and prevent disease progression in MP pneumonia patients without side effects, and antibiotics may have limited effects on MP infection.