VeriGen: A Large Language Model for Verilog Code Generation

In this study, we explore the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate hardware design by generating high-quality Verilog code, a common language for designing and modeling digital systems. We fine-tune pre-existing LLMs on Verilog datasets compiled from GitHub and Verilog textbooks. We evaluate the functional correctness of the generated Verilog code using a specially designed test suite, featuring a custom problem set and testing benches. Here, our fine-tuned open-source CodeGen-16B model outperforms the commercial state-of-the-art GPT-3.5-turbo model with a 1.1% overall increase. Upon testing with a more diverse and complex problem set, we find that the fine-tuned model shows competitive performance against state-of-the-art gpt-3.5-turbo, excelling in certain scenarios. Notably, it demonstrates a 41% improvement in generating syntactically correct Verilog code across various problem categories compared to its pre-trained counterpart, highlighting the potential of smaller, in-house LLMs in hardware design automation.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2212.1114

A Low-Power DSP Architecture for a Fully Implantable Cochlear Implant System-on-a-Chip.

The National Science Foundation Wireless Integrated Microsystems (WIMS) Engineering Research Center at the University of Michigan developed Systems-on-a-Chip to achieve biomedical implant and environmental monitoring functionality in low-milliwatt power consumption and 1-2 cm3 volume. The focus of this work is implantable electronics for cochlear implants (CIs), surgically implanted devices that utilize existing nerve connections between the brain and inner-ear in cases where degradation of the sensory hair cells in the cochlea has occurred. In the absence of functioning hair cells, a CI processes sound information and stimulates the nderlying nerve cells with currents from implanted electrodes, enabling the patient to understand speech. As the brain of the WIMS CI, the WIMS microcontroller unit (MCU) delivers the communication, signal processing, and storage capabilities required to satisfy the aggressive goals set forth. The 16-bit MCU implements a custom instruction set architecture focusing on power-efficient execution by providing separate data and address register windows, multi-word arithmetic, eight addressing modes, and interrupt and subroutine support. Along with 32KB of on-chip SRAM, a low-power 512-byte scratchpad memory is utilized by the WIMS custom compiler to obtain an average of 18% energy savings across benchmarks. A synthesizable dynamic frequency scaling circuit allows the chip to select a precision on-chip LC or ring oscillator, and perform clock scaling to minimize power dissipation; it provides glitch-free, software-controlled frequency shifting in 100ns, and dissipates only 480μW. A highly flexible and expandable 16-channel Continuous Interleaved Sampling Digital Signal Processor (DSP) is included as an MCU peripheral component. Modes are included to process data, stimulate through electrodes, and allow experimental stimulation or processing. The entire WIMS MCU occupies 9.18mm2 and consumes only 1.79mW from 1.2V in DSP mode. This is the lowest reported consumption for a cochlear DSP. Design methodologies were analyzed and a new top-down design flow is presented that encourages hardware and software co-design as well as cross-domain verification early in the design process. An O(n) technique for energy-per-instruction estimations both pre- and post-silicon is presented that achieves less than 4% error across benchmarks. This dissertation advances low-power system design while providing an improvement in hearing recovery devices.Ph.D.Electrical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91488/1/emarsman_1.pd

Distilling Representations from GAN Generator via Squeeze and Span

In recent years, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been an actively studied topic and shown to successfully produce high-quality realistic images in various domains. The controllable synthesis ability of GAN generators suggests that they maintain informative, disentangled, and explainable image representations, but leveraging and transferring their representations to downstream tasks is largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose to distill knowledge from GAN generators by squeezing and spanning their representations. We squeeze the generator features into representations that are invariant to semantic-preserving transformations through a network before they are distilled into the student network. We span the distilled representation of the synthetic domain to the real domain by also using real training data to remedy the mode collapse of GANs and boost the student network performance in a real domain. Experiments justify the efficacy of our method and reveal its great significance in self-supervised representation learning. Code is available at https://github.com/yangyu12/squeeze-and-span.Comment: 16 pages, NeurIPS 202

Benchmarking Arabic AI with Large Language Models

With large Foundation Models (FMs), language technologies (AI in general) are entering a new paradigm: eliminating the need for developing large-scale task-specific datasets and supporting a variety of tasks through set-ups ranging from zero-shot to few-shot learning. However, understanding FMs capabilities requires a systematic benchmarking effort by comparing FMs performance with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) task-specific models. With that goal, past work focused on the English language and included a few efforts with multiple languages. Our study contributes to ongoing research by evaluating FMs performance for standard Arabic NLP and Speech processing, including a range of tasks from sequence tagging to content classification across diverse domains. We start with zero-shot learning using GPT-3.5-turbo, Whisper, and USM, addressing 33 unique tasks using 59 publicly available datasets resulting in 96 test setups. For a few tasks, FMs performs on par or exceeds the performance of the SOTA models but for the majority it under-performs. Given the importance of prompt for the FMs performance, we discuss our prompt strategies in detail and elaborate on our findings. Our future work on Arabic AI will explore few-shot prompting, expand the range of tasks, and investigate additional open-source models.Comment: Foundation Models, Large Language Models, Arabic NLP, Arabic Speech, Arabic AI, , CHatGPT Evaluation, USM Evaluation, Whisper Evaluatio

Semicarbazide-sensitive amine oxidase substrates in obesity and diabetes

L'obésité et le diabète sont de sérieux problèmes de santé dans les pays développés. Le développement de médicaments qui pourraient normaliser un métabolisme glucidique alteré est donc une grande nécessité actuelle. L'amine oxydase sensible au semicarbazide (SSAO) semble être une cible d’intérêt pour améliorer l’homéostasie glucidique. Cette enzyme oxyde les amines primaires. Elle est fortement exprimée dans le tissu adipeux blanc (WAT) et dans les vaisseaux. Sa forme circulante est un facteur indépendant des complications cardiovasculaires du diabète et de l'obésité. Cependant, l'administration des substrats exogènes de la SSAO réduit l'hyperglycémie des animaux diabétiques. Il a été montré que le peroxyde d'hydrogène formé pendant l'oxidation des amines par la SSAO tissulaire est responsable d'un tel effet. Pourtant, cette espèce reactive de l'oxygène, à forte dose, peut aussi contribuer aux complications de l'obesité et du diabète. Nous avons étudié l'influence des substrats de la SSAO sur certains paramètres de l'obésité et du diabète. Nous avons d'abord examiné l'influence de la masse du tissu adipeux blanc sur sa richesse en SSAO en la faisant varier expérimentalement (obésité et jeûne). Nous avons ensuite analysé les actions insulinomimétiques de la benzylamine (BzA), un substrat exogène de la SSAO, in vitro et in vivo. De plus, nous avons étudié l’effet de traitements à long terme par la BzA sur la tolérance au glucose et les éventuelles complications vasculaires. Enfin, nous avons testé des molécules nouvelles, substrats potentiels de la SSAO sur des adipocytes humains. L'activité de la SSAO augmente dans le WAT sous-cutané de souris obèses. L'injection de BzA améliore l'homéostasie glucidique des animaux diabétiques de type 1 et 2. L'injection chronique de BzA améliore la function endothéliale de rats diabétiques si elle est effectuée simultanément avec du vanadate. L'administration chronique de BzA par voie orale améliore aussi la tolérance au glucose dans trois modèles de souris résistantes à l'insuline dans des conditions où nous n’avons pas observé d'effets délétères du peroxyde d'hydrogène. De plus, la concentration des nitrites augmente dans l'aorte, indiquant qu'une meilleure biodisponibilité du NO a accompagné la réduction du glucose plasmatique. Ces résultats obtenus sur des rongeurs obèses et diabétiques ont confirmé l'action bénéfique de la BzA sur le métabolisme glucidique. En utilisant un système de criblage basé sur l'utilisation d'adipocytes humains, nous avons caractérisé quelques molécules plus efficaces que la BzA pour mimer les effets de l'insuline. L'ensemble de ce travail nous encourage à considérer les substrats de la SSAO comme de possibles médicaments antidiabétiques.Obesity and diabetes are serious public health problems in developed countries and considerable efforts are put in the development of drugs improving impaired carbohydrate metabolism. Semicarbazide-sensitive amine oxidase (SSAO) may be a possible target. The enzyme catalyzes the oxidation of primary amines. SSAO is highly expressed in white adipose tissue (WAT) and in the vasculature. It has been found that its soluble form in plasma is an independent cardiovascular risk factor in diabetes. However, the administration of exogenous SSAO substrates has been shown to reduce hyperglycemia in diabetic animals. Hydrogen peroxide formed during the enzyme reaction has been proven responsible for such effect. However, this reactive oxygen species may contribute to vascular complications of obesity and diabetes, as well. Our aim was to explore the implication of SSAO substrates on certain parameters of diabetes and obesity. We investigated the influence of WAT extension (in obesity and fasting) on its SSAO content. We have analysed the insulin-like actions of benzylamine (BzA), an exogenous substrate of SSAO, in vitro and in vivo. Furthermore, being aware of the dual action of SSAO in diabetes, we also studied the effect of long-term BzA treatment on glucose handling and on putative vascular complications. Then, we tested SSAO substrate candidates in human adipocytes. SSAO activity was higher in subcutaneous WAT of obese than lean mice. BzA injection was effective alone to improve glucose homeostasis in type 1 and type 2 diabetic animals. Chronic BzA injections also improved endothelial function of diabetic rats when vanadate was simultaneously administered. Chronic oral administration of BzA improved glucose homeostasis in three mouse models of insulin-resistance. In such conditions, we did not observe any adverse effect of hydrogen peroxide. Moreover, increased aorta nitrite concentration, indicative of NO production, accompanied the reduction of fasting plasma glucose levels. In keeping with this, we have set up a pharmacological screening, based on human adipocytes, which allowed the detection of better SSAO substrates than BzA. The results obtained in obese and diabetic models thus confirmed the beneficial metabolic action of BzA and encouraged us to propose SSAO substrates as possible anti-hyperglycemic drug candidates

2017 - The Twenty-second Annual Symposium of Student Scholars

The full program book from the Twenty-second Annual Symposium of Student Scholars, held on April 20, 2017. Includes abstracts from the presentations and posters.https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/sssprograms/1019/thumbnail.jp

GSRS Event Program Booklet 2017

This event program booklet contains a schedule of the event, list of awards, and student abstracts

In vitro, in vivo, and in silico investigations of polymer and lipid based nanocarriers for drug and gene delivery

Nanomedicine research has expanded rapidly in the last decades. Several nanoparticle formulations are accepted in clinical use, e.g. for the treatment of cancer, infections and eye diseases, and also for diagnostics. Nanoparticle mediated drug delivery has many potential advantages over the free drug, such as better pharmacokinetic profile, lowered toxicity, and its possible use for cell-specific targeting and intracellular drug release. Therapeutic genes can also be packed into nanocarriers to protect them from enzymatic degradation and to mediate their cellular entry. Nonetheless, even though nanoparticles have so many advantages, there are many extracellular and intracellular barriers to overcome before achieving successful drug or gene delivery. The focus of this research work was to examine the formation and physico-chemical and biological features of lipid and polymer based nanoparticles for drug and gene delivery. First, the effect of the polymeric gene carrier composition and structure on DNA condensation efficacy and transgene expression was examined. The linear architecture and flexibility of poly(2-(dimethylamino)ethyl methacrylate) (PDMAEMA)-based block co-polymers clearly enhanced DNA condensation and transfection efficiency. In addition, by conjugating a membrane active protein, hydrophobin (HFBI) to DNA-binding cationic dendrons, the transfection efficacy was increased compared to plain dendron. However, cationic polymer-DNA complexes are prone to disruption by polyanions such as glycosaminoglycans (GAG) in the extracellular space. We coated poly(ethyleneimine) PEI/DNA complexes with anionic lipid mixture. The coating was able to protect the contents against GAGs, and it could respond to the change of endosomal pH and release the cargo inside the cells. In addition, two classes of liposomal cancer cell targeting approaches were evaluated in physicochemical studies and in cancer cell models in vitro and in mice. A promising activated endothelium targeting peptide (AETP) failed to target the liposomes to the cells. Molecular modeling revealed that hydrophobic AETP was hidden in the polyethylene glycol (PEG) shield of the liposomal surface thus it was not accessible for the target receptors. The last study describes applicability of pre-targeting and local intraperitoneal administration of epithelial growth factor receptor (EGFR)-targeted liposomes for drug targeting to tumors located in peritoneal cavity. In conclusion, the composition and architecture of nanocarriers have a crucial impact on DNA condensation, stability of the complexes and transfection efficacy. In liposomal cancer drug targeting, PEG shield may hinder the targeting efficiency of small molecular peptides. Intraperitoneal administration of liposomal drugs seems to be promising route for targeting to tumors located in the peritoneal cavity.Nanolääketutkimus on kasvanut voimakkaasti viimeisten vuosikymmenten aikana. Kliiniseen käyttöön, kuten syövän, infektioiden ja silmäsairauksien hoitoon sekä diagnostiikkaan on hyväksytty useita nanopartikkelivalmisteita. Kun lääkeaine pakataan nanometrikokoisiin partikkeleihin, kuten liposomeihin tai polymeerinanopartikkeleihin, lääkkeen vaikutusaikaa pystytään säätelemään ja lääkeaine voidaan kohdentaa tiettyihin kudoksiin tai soluihin. Lisäksi kapselointi partikkeleihin vähentää toksisten lääkeaineiden haittavaikutuksia. Nanopartikkeleita hyödynnetään myös geeniterapiassa geeninkuljettimina. Terapeuttisten geenien, kuten DNA:n pakkaaminen nanopartikkeleiksi suojaa DNA:ta elimistössä entsyymien aiheuttamalta hajoamiselta sekä parantaa sen pääsyä kohdesolujen sisään. Työssä tutkittiin geeninsiirtoon tarkoitettujen lipidi- ja polymeeripohjaisten nanopartikkelien koostumuksen ja rakenteen vaikutusta niiden kykyyn toimia geeninkantajina. Tutkimuksissa havaittiin, että lineaariset ja joustavarakenteiset poly(2-(dimetyyliamino)etyylimetakrylaatti) (PDMAEMA)-pohjaiset yhdistelmäpolymeerit olivat tehokkaampia geeninpakkaajia ja -kuljettimia kuin vastaavat tähtimäiset ja jäykkärakenteiset polymeerit. Lisäksi todettiin, että pinta-aktiivisen proteiinin, hydrofobiinin liittäminen DNA:ta sitovaan dendroniin paransi sen geeninsiirtotehokkuutta. Nämä positiivisesti varautuneet DNA-kompleksit hajoavat kuitenkin helposti elimistössä reagoimalla negatiivisesti varautuneiden glykosaminoglykaanien kanssa. DNA-kompleksin kestävyyttä onnistuttiin parantamaan päällystämällä kompleksi negatiivisesti varautuneella lipidikuorella, joka kuitenkin aktivoitui solun sisällä vapauttaen DNA:n. Työssä tarkasteltiin myös syöpäsoluihin kohdennettujen liposomilääkkeiden ominaisuuksia fysikaalisissa kokeissa sekä solu- ja eläinmalleissa. Tutkimuksissa huomattiin, että lupaava, syöpäkasvaimen uudissuoniin kohdentuva peptidi (AETP) ei kohdentanut liposomeja syöpäkudokseen. Molekyylimallitus osoitti, että rasvaliukoisena AETP reagoi liposomien pintarakenteen kanssa eikä siksi pystynyt kiinnittymään kohdesoluihinsa. Väitöskirjassa tutkittiin myös vasta-aineella (EGFR) kohdennettujen liposomien kertymistä munasarjasyöpäsoluihin sekä vatsaontelonsisäisiin kasvaimiin hiirillä. Yhteenvetona voidaan todeta, että nanopartikkelien koostumuksella ja rakenteella on olennainen vaikutus sen kykyyn sitoa ja siirtää DNA:ta soluihin. Kohdennettujen nanopartikkelien kehittelyssä tulee huomioida kohdennusligandin ja lääkepartikkelin väliset vuorovaikutukset, jotta ligandin kiinnittyminen kohdesoluunsa olisi mahdollisimman tehokasta. Liposomaalisen syöpälääkkeen annostelu vatsaonteloon näyttää lupaavalta antoreitiltä vatsaontelonsisäisiä kasvaimia, kuten munasarjasyöpää hoidettaessa