68,281 research outputs found
Limits on Fundamental Limits to Computation
An indispensable part of our lives, computing has also become essential to
industries and governments. Steady improvements in computer hardware have been
supported by periodic doubling of transistor densities in integrated circuits
over the last fifty years. Such Moore scaling now requires increasingly heroic
efforts, stimulating research in alternative hardware and stirring controversy.
To help evaluate emerging technologies and enrich our understanding of
integrated-circuit scaling, we review fundamental limits to computation: in
manufacturing, energy, physical space, design and verification effort, and
algorithms. To outline what is achievable in principle and in practice, we
recall how some limits were circumvented, compare loose and tight limits. We
also point out that engineering difficulties encountered by emerging
technologies may indicate yet-unknown limits.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl
Neural networks for small scale ORC optimization
This study concerns a thermodynamic and technical optimization of a small scale Organic Rankine Cycle system for waste heat
recovery applications. An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) has been used to develop a thermodynamic model to be used for
the maximization of the production of power while keeping the size of the heat exchangers and hence the cost of the plant at its
minimum. R1234yf has been selected as the working fluid. The results show that the use of ANN is promising in solving complex
nonlinear optimization problems that arise in the field of thermodynamics
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Macrophages promote epithelial proliferation following infectious and non-infectious lung injury through a Trefoil factor 2-dependent mechanism.
Coordinated efforts between macrophages and epithelia are considered essential for wound healing, but the macrophage-derived molecules responsible for repair are poorly defined. This work demonstrates that lung macrophages rely upon Trefoil factor 2 to promote epithelial proliferation following damage caused by sterile wounding, Nippostrongylus brasiliensis or Bleomycin sulfate. Unexpectedly, the presence of T, B, or ILC populations was not essential for macrophage-driven repair. Instead, conditional deletion of TFF2 in myeloid-restricted CD11cCre TFF2 flox mice exacerbated lung pathology and reduced the proliferative expansion of CD45- EpCAM+ pro-SPC+ alveolar type 2 cells. TFF2 deficient macrophages had reduced expression of the Wnt genes Wnt4 and Wnt16 and reconstitution of hookworm-infected CD11cCre TFF2flox mice with rWnt4 and rWnt16 restored the proliferative defect in lung epithelia post-injury. These data reveal a previously unrecognized mechanism wherein lung myeloid phagocytes utilize a TFF2/Wnt axis as a mechanism that drives epithelial proliferation following lung injury
Rationale in Development Chat Messages: An Exploratory Study
Chat messages of development teams play an increasingly significant role in
software development, having replaced emails in some cases. Chat messages
contain information about discussed issues, considered alternatives and
argumentation leading to the decisions made during software development. These
elements, defined as rationale, are invaluable during software evolution for
documenting and reusing development knowledge. Rationale is also essential for
coping with changes and for effective maintenance of the software system.
However, exploiting the rationale hidden in the chat messages is challenging
due to the high volume of unstructured messages covering a wide range of
topics. This work presents the results of an exploratory study examining the
frequency of rationale in chat messages, the completeness of the available
rationale and the potential of automatic techniques for rationale extraction.
For this purpose, we apply content analysis and machine learning techniques on
more than 8,700 chat messages from three software development projects. Our
results show that chat messages are a rich source of rationale and that machine
learning is a promising technique for detecting rationale and identifying
different rationale elements.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures. The 14th International Conference on Mining
Software Repositories (MSR'17
Identifying and improving reusability based on coupling patterns
Open Source Software (OSS) communities have not yet taken full advantage of reuse mechanisms. Typically many OSS projects which share the same application domain and topic, duplicate effort and code, without fully leveraging the vast amounts of available code.
This study proposes the empirical evaluation of source code folders of OSS projects in order to determine their actual internal reuse and their potential as shareable, fine-grained and externally reusable software components by future projects.
This paper empirically analyzes four OSS systems, identifies which components (in the form of folders) are currently being reused internally and studies their coupling characteristics. Stable components (i.e., those which act as service providers rather than service consumers) are shown to be more likely to be reusable. As a means of supporting replication of these successful instances of OSS reuse, source folders with similar patterns are extracted from the studied systems, and identified as externally reusable components
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