Query: A 0.6-V 800-MHz All-Digital Phase-Locked Loop With a Digital Supply Regulator

Relevant passages:
All-digital PLL and transmitter for mobile phones <=SEP=> We present the first all-digital PLL and polar transmitter for mobile phones. They are part of a single-chip GSM/EDGE transceiver SoC fabricated in a 90 nm digital CMOS process. The circuits are architectured from the ground up to be compatible with digital deep-submicron CMOS processes and be readily integrateable with a digital baseband and application processor. To achieve this, we exploit the new paradigm of a deep-submicron CMOS process environment by leveraging on the fast switching times of MOS transistors, the fine lithography and the precise device matching, while avoiding problems related to the limited voltage headroom. The transmitter architecture is fully digital and utilizes the wideband direct frequency modulation capability of the all-digital PLL. The amplitude modulation is realized digitally by regulating the number of active NMOS transistor switches in accordance with the instantaneous amplitude. The conventional RF frequency synthesizer architecture, based on a voltage-controlled oscillator and phase/frequency detector and charge-pump combination, has been replaced with a digitally controlled oscillator and a time-to-digital converter. The transmitter performs GMSK modulation with less than 0.5/spl deg/ rms phase error, -165 dBc/Hz phase noise at 20 MHz offset, and 10 /spl mu/s settling time. The 8-PSK EDGE spectral mask is met with 1.2% EVM. The transmitter occupies 1.5 mm/sup 2/ and consumes 42 mA at 1.2 V supply while producing 6 dBm RF output power.

A Design Procedure for All-Digital Phase-Locked Loops Based on a Charge-Pump Phase-Locked-Loop Analogy <=SEP=> In this brief, a systematic design procedure for a second-order all-digital phase-locked loop (PLL) is proposed. The design procedure is based on the analogy between a type-II second-order analog PLL and an all-digital PLL. The all-digital PLL design inherits the frequency response and stability characteristics of the analog prototype PLL

Analysis and modeling of bang-bang clock and data recovery circuits <=SEP=> A large-signal piecewise-linear model is proposed for bang-bang phase detectors that predicts characteristics of clock and data recovery circuits such as jitter transfer, jitter tolerance, and jitter generation. The results are validated by 1-Gb/s and 10-Gb/s CMOS prototypes using an Alexander phase detector and an LC oscillator.

Analysis of charge-pump phase-locked loops <=SEP=> In this paper, we present an exact analysis for third-order charge-pump phase-locked loops using state equations. Both the large-signal lock acquisition process and the small-signal linear tracking behavior are described using this analysis. The nonlinear state equations are linearized for the small-signal condition and the z-domain noise transfer functions are derived. A comparison to some of the existing analysis methods such as the impulse-invariant transformation and s-domain analysis is provided. The effect of the loop parameters and the reference frequency on the loop phase margin and stability is analyzed. The analysis is verified using behavioral simulations in MATLAB and SPECTRE.

Digitally Controlled Oscillator ( DCO )-Based Architecture for RF Frequency Synthesis in a Deep-Submicrometer CMOS Process <=SEP=> A novel digitally controlled oscillator (DCO)-based architecture for frequency synthesis in wireless RF applications is proposed and demonstrated. It deliberately avoids any use of an analog tuning voltage control line. Fine frequency resolution is achieved through high-speed dithering. Other imperfections of analog circuits are compensated through digital means. The presented ideas enable the employment of fully-digital frequency synthesizers using sophisticated signal processing algorithms, realized in the most advanced deep-submicrometer digital CMOS processes which allow almost no analog extensions. They also promote costeffective integration with the digital back-end onto a single silicon die. The demonstrator test chip has been fabricated in a digital 0.13m CMOS process together with a DSP, which acts as a digital baseband processor with a large number of digital gates in order to investigate noise coupling. The phase noise is112 dBc/Hz at 500-kHz offset. The close-in spurious tones are below 62 dBc, while the far-out spurs are below 80 dBc. The presented ideas have been incorporated in a commercial Bluetooth transceiver.

Exploiting the use of recurrent neural networks for driver behavior profiling <=SEP=> Driver behavior affects traffic safety, fuel/energy consumption and gas emissions. The purpose of driver behavior profiling is to understand and have a positive influence on driver behavior. Driver behavior profiling tasks usually involve an automated collection of driving data and the application of computer models to classify what characterizes the aggressiveness of drivers. Different sensors and classification methods have been employed for this task, although low-cost solutions, high performance and collaborative sensing remain open questions for research. This paper makes an investigation with different Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), aiming to classify driving events employing data collected by smartphone accelerometers. The results show that specific configurations of RNN upon accelerometer data provide high accuracy results, being a step towards the development of safer transportation systems.

Spelling Correction for Morphologically Rich Language: a Case Study of Russian <=SEP=> We present an algorithm for automatic correction of spelling errors on the sentence level, which uses noisy channel model and feature-based reranking of hypotheses. Our system is designed for Russian and clearly outperforms the winner of SpellRuEval-2016 competition. We show that language model size has the greatest influence on spelling correction quality. We also experiment with different types of features and show that morphological and semantic information also improves the accuracy of spellchecking. The task of automatic spelling correction has applications in different areas including correction of search queries, spellchecking in browsers and text editors etc. It attracted intensive attention in early era of modern NLP. Many researchers addressed both the problems of effective candidates generation (Kernighan et al., 1990; Brill and Moore, 2000) and their adequate ranking (Golding and Roth, 1999; Whitelaw et al., 2009). Recently, the focus has moved to close but separate areas of text normalization (Han et al., 2013) and grammar errors correction (Ng et al., 2014), though the task of spellchecking is far from being perfectly solved. Most of early works were conducted for English for which NLP tasks are usually easier than for other languages due to simplicity of its morphology and strict word order. Also there were studies for Arabic (papers of QALB-2014 Shared Task (Ng et al., 2014)) and Chinese (Wu et al., 2013), but for most languages the problem still is open. In context of Slavic languages, there were just a few works including Sorokin and Shavrina (2016) for Russian, Richter et al. (2012) for Czech and Hladek et al. (2013) for Slovak. However, spelling correction becomes actual again due to intensive growth of social media. Indeed, corpora of Web texts including blogs, microblogs, forums etc. become the main sources for corpus studies. Most of these corpora are very large so they are collected and processed automatically with only limited manual correction. Hence, most texts in such corpora contain various types of spelling variation, from mere typos and orthographic errors to dialectal and sociolinguistic peculiarities. Moreover, orthographic errors are unavoidable since the more social media texts we have, the higher is the fraction of those, whose authors are not well-educated and therefore tend to make mistakes. That increases the percentage of out-of-vocabulary words in text, which affects the quality of any further NLP task from lemmatization to any kind of parsing or information extraction. Summarizing, it is desirable to detect and correct at least undoubtable misspellings in Web texts with high precision. Unfortunately, there were very few studies dealing with spellchecking for real-world Web texts, e.g. LiveJournal or Facebook. Most authors investigated spelling correction in a rather restricted fashion. They focused on selecting a correct word from a small pre-defined confusion set (e.g., adopt/adapt), skipping a problem of detecting misprints or generating the set of possible corrections. Often researchers did not deal with real-world errors just randomly introducing typos in every word with some probability. Therefore, spelling correction has no “intelligent baseline” algorithm such as trigram HMM-models for morphological parsing or CBOW vectors for distributional similarity. One of the goals of our work is to propose such a baseline. The principal feature of our approach is that it works with entire sentences, not on the level of separate words. A serious problem for research on spellcheck45 ing is the lack of publicly available datasets for spelling correction in different languages. Fortunately, recently such a corpus was created for Russian during SpellRuEval-2016 competition (Sorokin et al., 2016). Russian is rather complex for NLP tasks because of its developed nominal and verb morphology and free word order. Therefore it is well-suited for extensive testing of spelling correction algorithms, although our results are applicable to any other language having similar properties. We propose a reranking algorithm for automatic spelling correction and evaluate it on SpellRuEval2016 dataset. The paper is organized as follows: Section 1 summarizes previous work on automatic spelling correction focusing on context-sensitive approaches, Section 2 contains our algorithm, Section 3 describes test data, Section 4 analyzes the performance of our system depending on different settings and we conclude in Section 5.

Automotive Ethernet: In-vehicle networking and smart mobility <=SEP=> This paper discusses novel communication network topologies and components and describes an evolutionary path of bringing Ethernet into automotive applications with focus on electric mobility. For next generation in-vehicle networking, the automotive industry identified Ethernet as a promising candidate besides CAN and FlexRay. Ethernet is an IEEE standard and is broadly used in consumer and industry domains. It will bring a number of changes for the design and management of in-vehicle networks and provides significant re-use of components, software, and tools. Ethernet is intended to connect inside the vehicle high-speed communication requiring sub-systems like Advanced Driver Assistant Systems (ADAS), navigation and positioning, multimedia, and connectivity systems. For hybrid (HEVs) or electric vehicles (EVs), Ethernet will be a powerful part of the communication architecture layer that enables the link between the vehicle electronics and the Internet where the vehicle is a part of a typical Internet of Things (IoT) application. Using Ethernet for vehicle connectivity will effectively manage the huge amount of data to be transferred between the outside world and the vehicle through vehicle-to-x (V2V and V2I or V2I+I) communication systems and cloud-based services for advanced energy management solutions. Ethernet is an enabling technology for introducing advanced features into the automotive domain and needs further optimizations in terms of scalability, cost, power, and electrical robustness in order to be adopted and widely used by the industry.

Root Gap Correction with a Deep Inpainting Model <=SEP=> Imaging roots of growing plants in a non-invasive and affordable fashion has been a long-standing problem in image-assisted plant breeding and phenotyping. One of the most affordable and diffuse approaches is the use of mesocosms, where plants are grown in soil against a glass surface that permits the roots visualization and imaging. However, due to soil and the fact that the plant root is a 2D projection of a 3D object, parts of the root are occluded. As a result, even under perfect root segmentation, the resulting images contain several gaps that may hinder the extraction of finely grained root system architecture traits. We propose an effective deep neural network to recover gaps from disconnected root segments. We train a fully supervised encoder-decoder deep CNN that, given an image containing gaps as input, generates an inpainted version, recovering the missing parts. Since in real data ground-truth is lacking, we use synthetic root images [10] that we artificially perturb by introducing gaps to train and evaluate our approach. We show that our network can work both in dicot and monocot cases in reducing root gaps. We also show promising exemplary results in real data from chickpea root architectures.

Punching shear capacity of continuous slabs <=SEP=> Provisions for punching shear design of reinforced concrete slabs are usually calibrated on the basis of results from tests on isolated specimens that simulate the slab zone within the points of contraflexure around a column. However, the punching behavior of interior slab-column connections in actual continuous slabs without transverse reinforcement may be influenced by the effects of moment redistribution and compressive membrane action, which can lead to higher punching strengths and lower deformation capacities compared to those in isolated specimens. This paper discusses these behavioral differences on the basis of experiments performed on symmetric edge-restrained slabs and investigates available test data by means of a numerical model. A simplified calculation method (based on the Critical Shear Crack Theory) that accounts for these effects is also proposed. The calculation model shows consistent agreement with the results of the numerical evaluation and is sufficiently simple to be used in design and assessment.

Digital Dead Time Auto-Tuning for Maximum Efficiency Operation of Isolated DC-DC Converters <=SEP=> The rapidly growing use of digital control in Distributed Power Architectures (DPA) has been primarily driven by the increasing need of sophisticated Power Management functions. However, specifically designed control algorithms can also be exploited for optimizing the system performance. In this paper we present a new auto-tuning method and system that makes it possible to operate an isolated DC-DC converter at maximum efficiency. The auto-tuning performs an optimum adjustment of both primary side dead time and secondary side conduction times based on the measurement of the input current. It does not require any additional external components since current sensing functions are already implemented for power management purposes. Experimental measurements performed on an asymmetrical driven half-bridge DC-DC converter demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution and its robustness to component variations.

A Hybrid Model to Detect Malicious Executables <=SEP=> We present a hybrid data mining approach to detect malicious executables. In this approach we identify important features of the malicious and benign executables. These features are used by a classifier to learn a classification model that can distinguish between malicious and benign executables. We construct a novel combination of three different kinds of features: binary n-grams, assembly n-grams, and library function calls. Binary features are extracted from the binary executables, whereas assembly features are extracted from the disassembled executables. The function call features are extracted from the program headers. We also propose an efficient and scalable feature extraction technique. We apply our model on a large corpus of real benign and malicious executables. We extract the above mentioned features from the data and train a classifier using support vector machine. This classifier achieves a very high accuracy and low false positive rate in detecting malicious executables. Our model is compared with other feature-based approaches, and found to be more efficient in terms of detection accuracy and false alarm rate.

Scalable knowledge harvesting with high precision and high recall <=SEP=> Harvesting relational facts from Web sources has received great attention for automatically constructing large knowledge bases. Stateof-the-art approaches combine pattern-based gathering of fact candidates with constraint-based reasoning. However, they still face major challenges regarding the trade-offs between precision, recall, and scalability. Techniques that scale well are susceptible to noisy patterns that degrade precision, while techniques that employ deep reasoning for high precision cannot cope with Web-scale data.
 This paper presents a scalable system, called PROSPERA, for high-quality knowledge harvesting. We propose a new notion of ngram-itemsets for richer patterns, and use MaxSat-based constraint reasoning on both the quality of patterns and the validity of fact candidates.We compute pattern-occurrence statistics for two benefits: they serve to prune the hypotheses space and to derive informative weights of clauses for the reasoner. The paper shows how to incorporate these building blocks into a scalable architecture that can parallelize all phases on a Hadoop-based distributed platform. Our experiments with the ClueWeb09 corpus include comparisons to the recent ReadTheWeb experiment. We substantially outperform these prior results in terms of recall, with the same precision, while having low run-times.

Manufacturing Analytics and Industrial Internet of Things <=SEP=> Over the last two decades, manufacturing across the globe has evolved to be more intel-ligent and data driven. In the age of industrial Internet of Things, a smart production unit can be perceived as a large connected industrial system of materials, parts, machines, tools, inventory, and logistics that can relay data and communicate with each other. While, traditionally, the focus has been on machine health and predictive maintenance, the manufacturing industry has also started focusing on analyzing data from the entire production line. These applications bring a new set of analytics challenges. Unlike tradi-tional data mining analysis, which consists of lean datasets (that is, datasets with few fea-tures), manufacturing has fat datasets. In addition, previous approaches to manufacturing analytics restricted themselves to small time periods of data. The latest advances in big data analytics allows researchers to do a deep dive into years of data. Bosch collects and utilizes all available information about its products to increase its understanding of complex linear and nonlinear relationships between parts, machines, and assembly lines. This helps in use cases such as the discovery of the root cause of internal defects. This article presents a case study and provides detail about challenges and approaches in data extraction, modeling, and visualization.

Optimized Broadcast for Deep Learning Workloads on Dense-GPU InfiniBand Clusters: MPI or NCCL? <=SEP=> Traditionally, MPI runtimes have been designed for clusters with a large number of nodes. However, with the advent of MPI+CUDA applications and dense multi-GPU systems, it has become important to design efficient communication schemes. This coupled with new application workloads brought forward by Deep Learning frameworks like Caffe and Microsoft CNTK pose additional design constraints due to very large message communication of GPU buffers during the training phase. In this context, special-purpose libraries like NCCL have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a pipelined chain (ring) design for the MPI_Bcast collective operation along with an enhanced collective tuning framework in MVAPICH2-GDR that enables efficient intra-/internode multi-GPU communication. We present an in-depth performance landscape for the proposed MPI_Bcast schemes along with a comparative analysis of NCCL Broadcast and NCCL-based MPI_Bcast. The proposed designs for MVAPICH2-GDR enable up to 14X and 16.6X improvement, compared to NCCL-based solutions, for intra- and internode broadcast latency, respectively. In addition, the proposed designs provide up to 7% improvement over NCCL-based solutions for data parallel training of the VGG network on 128 GPUs using Microsoft CNTK. The proposed solutions outperform the recently introduced NCCL2 library for small and medium message sizes and offer comparable/better performance for very large message sizes.

Hesitant fuzzy analytic hierarchy process <=SEP=> Ordinary fuzzy sets have been recently extended to intuitionistic and hesitant fuzzy sets, which are frequently used for the solution of decision-making problems. All these extensions aim at better defining the membership values or functions of the considered parameters. In this paper we develop a hesitant fuzzy analytic hierarchy process method involving multi-experts' linguistic evaluations aggregated by ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator. The developed hesitant fuzzy AHP method is applied to a multicriteria supplier selection problem.

Multi-clip video editing from a single viewpoint <=SEP=> We propose a framework for automatically generating multiple clips suitable for video editing by simulating pan-tilt-zoom camera movements within the frame of a single static camera. Assuming important actors and objects can be localized using computer vision techniques, our method requires only minimal user input to define the subject matter of each sub-clip. The composition of each sub-clip is automatically computed in a novel L1-norm optimization framework. Our approach encodes several common cinematographic practices into a single convex cost function minimization problem, resulting in aesthetically pleasing sub-clips which can easily be edited together using off-the-shelf multi-clip video editing software. We demonstrate our approach on five video sequences of a live theatre performance by generating multiple synchronized subclips for each sequence.

Outcome prediction of DOTA2 based on Naïve Bayes classifier <=SEP=> Although DOTA2 is a popular game around the world, no clear algorithm or software are designed to forecast the winning probability by analyzing the lineups. However, the author finds that Naive Bayes classifier, one of the most common classification algorithm, can analyze the lineups and predict the outcome according to the lineups and gives an improved Naive Bayes classifier. Using the DOTA2 data set published in the UCI Machine Learning Repository, we test Naive Bayes classifier's prediction of respective winning probability of both sides in the game. The results show that Naive Bayes classifier is a practical tool to analyze the lineups and predict the outcome based on players' choices.

Forma Track: Tracking People based on Body Shape <=SEP=> Knowledge of a person’s whereabouts in the home is key to context-aware applications, but many people do not want to carry or wear a tag or mobile device in the home. Therefore, many tracking systems are now using so-called weak biometrics such as height, weight, and width. In this paper, we propose to use body shape as a weak biometric, differentiating people based on features such as head size, shoulder size, or torso size. The basic idea is to scan the body with a radar sensor and to compute the reflection profile: the amount of energy that reflects back from each part of the body. Many people have different body shapes even if they have the same height, weight, or width, which makes body shape a stronger biometric. We built a proof-of-concept system called FormaTrack to test this approach, and evaluate using eight participants of varying height and weight. We collected over 2800 observations while capturing a wide range of factors such as clothing, hats, shoes, and backpacks. Results show that FormaTrack can achieve a precision, recall, direction and identity accuracy (over all possible groups of 2 people) of 100%, 99.86%, 99.7% and 95.3% respectively. Results indicate that FormaTrack can achieve over 99% tracking accuracy with 2 people in a home with 5 or more rooms.

Benchmarking distributed data warehouse solutions for storing genomic variant information <=SEP=> Database URL
https://github.com/ZSI-Bio/variantsdwh.

In vivo evaluation of bacterial cellulose/acrylic acid wound dressing hydrogel containing keratinocytes and fibroblasts for burn wounds <=SEP=> The healing of wounds, including those from burns, currently exerts a burden on healthcare systems worldwide. Hydrogels are widely used as wound dressings and in the field of tissue engineering. The popularity of bacterial cellulose-based hydrogels has increased owing to their biocompatibility. Previous study demonstrated that bacterial cellulose/acrylic acid (BC/AA) hydrogel increased the healing rate of burn wound. This in vivo study using athymic mice has extended the use of BC/AA hydrogel by the addition of human epidermal keratinocytes and human dermal fibroblasts. The results showed that hydrogel loaded with cells produces the greatest acceleration on burn wound healing, followed by treatment with hydrogel alone, compared with the untreated group. The percentage wound reduction on day 13 in the mice treated with hydrogel loaded with cells (77.34 ± 6.21%) was significantly higher than that in the control-treated mice (64.79 ± 6.84%). Histological analysis, the expression of collagen type I via immunohistochemistry, and transmission electron microscopy indicated a greater deposition of collagen in the mice treated with hydrogel loaded with cells than in the mice administered other treatments. Therefore, the BC/AA hydrogel has promising application as a wound dressing and a cell carrier.

Expert and exceptional performance: evidence of maximal adaptation to task constraints. <=SEP=> Expert and exceptional performance are shown to be mediated by cognitive and perceptual-motor skills and by domain-specific physiological and anatomical adaptations. The highest levels of human performance in different domains can only be attained after around ten years of extended, daily amounts of deliberate practice activities. Laboratory analyses of expert performance in many domains such as chess, medicine, auditing, computer programming, bridge, physics, sports, typing, juggling, dance, and music reveal maximal adaptations of experts to domain-specific constraints. For example, acquired anticipatory skills circumvent general limits on reaction time, and distinctive memory skills allow a domain-specific expansion of working memory capacity to support planning, reasoning, and evaluation. Many of the mechanisms of superior expert performance serve the dual purpose of mediating experts' current performance and of allowing continued improvement of this performance in response to informative feedback during practice activities.

AutoSVD++: An Efficient Hybrid Collaborative Filtering Model via Contractive Auto-encoders <=SEP=> Collaborative filtering (CF) has been successfully used to provide users with personalized products and services. However, dealing with the increasing sparseness of user-item matrix still remains a challenge. To tackle such issue, hybrid CF such as combining with content based filtering and leveraging side information of users and items has been extensively studied to enhance performance. However, most of these approaches depend on hand-crafted feature engineering, which is usually noise-prone and biased by different feature extraction and selection schemes. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid model by generalizing contractive auto-encoder paradigm into matrix factorization framework with good scalability and computational efficiency, which jointly models content information as representations of effectiveness and compactness, and leverage implicit user feedback to make accurate recommendations. Extensive experiments conducted over three large-scale real datasets indicate the proposed approach outperforms the compared methods for item recommendation.

wUbi-Pen: windows graphical user interface interacting with haptic feedback stylus <=SEP=> In this work, we designed stylus type haptic interfaces interacting with a touch screen. There are two kinds of haptic styli termed wUbi-Pen. The type I has functions of providing vibration, impact, texture and sound and it is a stand alone system including own battery and wireless communication module. The type II does not include the texture display module and it is a miniaturized version. We present a new interaction scheme on the Windows graphical user interface based on pointer movement haptic feedback events such as clicking, drag, drop, moving and etc. In addition, a simple interactive digital sketchbook has been implemented, which is providing haptic and auditory feedback while drawing and touching objects. We also introduce a tactile image display method on a touch screen with the wUbi-Pen and a simple fitting puzzle utilizing haptic feedback events.

OpenARC: open accelerator research compiler for directive-based, efficient heterogeneous computing <=SEP=> This paper presents Open Accelerator Research Compiler (OpenARC): an open-source framework that supports the full feature set of OpenACC V1.0 and performs source-to-source transformations, targeting heterogeneous devices, such as NVIDIA GPUs. Combined with its high-level, extensible Intermediate Representation (IR) and rich semantic annotations, OpenARC serves as a powerful research vehicle for prototyping optimization, source-to-source transformations, and instrumentation for debugging, performance analysis, and autotuning. In fact, OpenARC is equipped with various capabilities for advanced analyses and transformations, as well as built-in performance and debugging tools. We explain the overall design and implementation of OpenARC, and we present key analysis techniques necessary to efficiently port OpenACC applications. Porting various OpenACC applications to CUDA GPUs using OpenARC demonstrates that OpenARC performs similarly to a commercial compiler, while serving as a general research framework.

Order patterns recurrence plots in the analysis of ERP data <=SEP=> Recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) is an established tool for data analysis in various behavioural sciences. In this article we present a refined notion of RQA based on order patterns. The use of order patterns is commonplace in time series analysis. Exploiting this concept in combination with recurrence plots (RP) and their quantification (RQA) allows for advances in contemporary EEG research, specifically in the analysis of event related potentials (ERP), as the method is known to be robust against non-stationary data. The use of order patterns recurrence plots (OPRPs) on EEG data recorded during a language processing experiment exemplifies the potentials of the method. We could show that the application of RQA to ERP data allows for a considerable reduction of the number of trials required in ERP research while still maintaining statistical validity.

On Symmetric and Asymmetric LSHs for Inner Product Search <=SEP=> We consider the problem of designing locality sensitive hashes (LSH) for inner product similarity, and of the power of asymmetric hashes in this context. Shrivastava and Li argue that there is no symmetric LSH for the problem and propose an asymmetric LSH based on different mappings for query and database points. However, we show there does exist a simple symmetric LSH that enjoys stronger guarantees and better empirical performance than the asymmetric LSH they suggest. We also show a variant of the settings where asymmetry is in-fact needed, but there a different asymmetric LSH is required.

CORONET: Fault tolerance for Software Defined Networks <=SEP=> Software Defined Networking, or SDN, based networks are being deployed not only in testbed networks, but also in production networks. Although fault-tolerance is one of the most desirable properties in production networks, there are not much study in providing fault-tolerance to SDN-based networks. The goal of this work is to develop a fault tolerant SDN architecture that can rapidly recover from faults and scale to large network sizes. This paper presents CORONET, a SDN fault-tolerant system that recovers from multiple link failures in the data plane. We describe a prototype implementation based on NOX that demonstrates fault recovery for emulated topologies using Mininet. We also discuss possible extensions to handle control plane and controller faults.

Alteration of the platelet serotonin transporter in romantic love. <=SEP=> BACKGROUND
The evolutionary consequences of love are so important that there must be some long-established biological process regulating it. Recent findings suggest that the serotonin (5-HT) transporter might be linked to both neuroticism and sexual behaviour as well as to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The similarities between an overvalued idea, such as that typical of subjects in the early phase of a love relationship, and obsession, prompted us to explore the possibility that the two conditions might share alterations at the level of the 5-HT transporter.


METHODS
Twenty subjects who had recently (within the previous 6 months) fallen in love, 20 unmedicated OCD patients and 20 normal controls, were included in the study. The 5-HT transporter was evaluated with the specific binding of 3H-paroxetine (3H-Par) to platelet membranes.


RESULTS
The results showed that the density of 3H-Par binding sites was significantly lower in subjects who had recently fallen in love and in OCD patients than in controls.


DISCUSSION
The main finding of the present study is that subjects who were in the early romantic phase of a love relationship were not different from OCD patients in terms of the density of the platelet 5-HT transporter, which proved to be significantly lower than in the normal controls. This would suggest common neurochemical changes involving the 5-HT system, linked to psychological dimensions shared by the two conditions, perhaps at an ideational level.

Message authentication in driverless cars <=SEP=> Driverless cars and driver-assisted vehicles are becoming prevalent in today's transportation systems. Companies like TESLA, Audi, and Google are among the leaders in this new era of the automotive industry. Modern vehicles, equipped with sophisticated navigation devices, complex driver-assisted systems, and a whole lot of safety features, bring broader impacts to our quality of life, economic development, and environmental sustainability. Instant safety messages such as pre-collision warnings, blind-spot detection, pedestrian and object awareness significantly improve the safety for drivers, passengers, and pedestrians. As a result, vehicles would be able to travel closely yet safely together, forming a platoon, thus resulting in a reduction of traffic congestion and fuel consumption. Driverless cars also have non-safety-related applications: which are used to facilitate traffic management and infotainment dissemination for drivers and passengers. Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET), the wireless communication technology enabling driverless cars, features not only dynamic topology but also high mobility. The vehicle nodes move rapidly on streets and highways. Their movements also depend on but not limited to road traffic, speed limits, and behavior of nearby vehicles. With massive amount of messages exchanged among driverless cars that command the cars' movements at high speeds and in close distances, any malicious alternation could lead to disastrous accidents. Message authentication to ensure data integrity is paramount to attack preparation. This paper presents a novel message authentication scheme that protects cars from bogus messages and makes VANET resilient to Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. The work includes a simulation framework that integrates vehicle and data traffic models to validate the effectiveness of the proposed message authentication scheme.