PCI-AER interface for Neuro-inspired Spiking Systems

Address event representation (AER) is a neuromorphic interchip communication protocol that allows for real-time connectivity between huge number neurons located on different chips. By exploiting high speed digital communication circuits (nano-seconds), synaptic neural connections can be time multiplexed (mili-seconds). When building multi-chip muti-layered AER systems it is absolutely necessary to have a computer interface that allows: (a) to read AER interchip traffic; and (b) inject a sequence of events to the AER structure. This paper presents a PCI to AER interface, that dispatches a sequence of events with timing information. It is able to recovery the possible delays introduced by AER bus. It has been implemented in real time hardware using VHDL and tested in a PCI-AER board, developed by authors, that currently capable to send and receive events at a peak rate of 16 Mev/sec, and a typical rate of 10 Mev/secEuropean Commission IST-2001-34124Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC-2003-08164-C03-0

Individual differences in automatic emotion regulation interact with primed emotion regulation during an anger provocation

The current study investigated the interactive effects of individual differences in automatic emotion regulation (AER) and primed emotion regulation strategy on skin conductance level (SCL) and heart rate during provoked anger. The study was a 2 × 2 [AER tendency (expression vs. control) × priming (expression vs. control)] between subject design. Participants were assigned to two groups according to their performance on an emotion regulation-IAT (differentiating automatic emotion control tendency and automatic emotion expression tendency). Then participants of the two groups were randomly assigned to two emotion regulation priming conditions (emotion control priming or emotion expression priming). Anger was provoked by blaming participants for slow performance during a subsequent backward subtraction task. In anger provocation, SCL of individuals with automatic emotion control tendencies in the control priming condition was lower than of those with automatic emotion control tendencies in the expression priming condition. However, SCL of individuals with automatic emotion expression tendencies did no differ in the automatic emotion control priming or the automatic emotion expression priming condition. Heart rate during anger provocation was higher in individuals with automatic emotion expression tendencies than in individuals with automatic emotion control tendencies regardless of priming condition. This pattern indicates an interactive effect of individual differences in AER and emotion regulation priming on SCL, which is an index of emotional arousal. Heart rate was only sensitive to the individual differences in AER, and did not reflect this interaction. This finding has implications for clinical studies of the use of emotion regulation strategy training suggesting that different practices are optimal for individuals who differ in AER tendencies

Integrating Emotion Recognition with Speech Recognition and Speaker Diarisation for Conversations

Although automatic emotion recognition (AER) has recently drawn significant research interest, most current AER studies use manually segmented utterances, which are usually unavailable for dialogue systems. This paper proposes integrating AER with automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speaker diarisation (SD) in a jointly-trained system. Distinct output layers are built for four sub-tasks including AER, ASR, voice activity detection and speaker classification based on a shared encoder. Taking the audio of a conversation as input, the integrated system finds all speech segments and transcribes the corresponding emotion classes, word sequences, and speaker identities. Two metrics are proposed to evaluate AER performance with automatic segmentation based on time-weighted emotion and speaker classification errors. Results on the IEMOCAP dataset show that the proposed system consistently outperforms two baselines with separately trained single-task systems on AER, ASR and SD.Comment: Interspeech 202

Indeterminacy, Aggregate Demand, and the Real Business Cycle

We show that under indeterminacy aggregate demand shocks are able to explain not only aspects of actual °uctuations that standard RBC models predict fairly well, but also aspects of actual °uctuations that standard RBC models cannot explain, such as the hump-shaped, trend reverting impulse responses to transitory shocks found in US output (Cogley and Nason, AER, 1995); the large forecastable movements and comovements of output, consumption and hours (Rotemberg and Woodford, AER, 1996); and the fact that consumption appears to lead output and investment over the business cycle. Indeterminacy arises in our model due to capacity utilization and mild increasing returns to scale.

Mark E Josephson: Clinical Investigator

Mark E Josephson entered the world of clinical cardiac electrophysiology (EP) almost at its inception (1972); with so much to learn and so many directions one could take, he dived into the field with unbridled enthusiasm and an uncommon - perhaps almost unique - aptitude for asking questions and finding ways to answer them. Few aspects of EP escaped his indelible influence. In this short paper, I will attempt to touch on some of the high points of his astounding career as a clinical investigator

On the structure of the fibers of truncation morphisms

Let k be an algebraically closed field and let X be a separated scheme of finite type over k of pure dimension d. We study the structure of the fibres of the truncation morphisms from the arc space of X to jet spaces of X and also between jet spaces. Our results are generalizations of results of Denef, Loeser, Ein and Mustata. We will use them to find the optimal lower bound for the poles of the motivic zeta function associated to an arbitrary ideal.Comment: 18 pages, to appear in the Bulletin of the London Mathematical Societ

Brain natriuretic peptide is related to diastolic dysfunction whereas urinary albumin excretion rate is related to left ventricular mass in asymptomatic type 2 diabetes patients

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The aims of this study were to estimate the prevalence of left ventricular systolic (LVSD) and diastolic (LVDD) dysfunction, and to test if BNP and urinary albumin excretion rate (AER) are related to LVSD, LVD and left ventricular mass (LVM) in asymptomatic type 2 diabetes patients.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Presence of LVSD, LVDD and LVM, determined with echocardiography, was related to levels of BNP and AER in 153 consecutive asymptomatic patients with type 2 diabetes.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>LVSD was present in 6.1% of patients whereas 49% (29% mild, 19% moderate and 0.7% severe) had LVDD and 9.4% had left ventricular hypertrophy. Increasing age (P < 0.0001) was the only independent variable related to mild LVDD whereas increasing BNP (P = 0.01), systolic blood pressure (P = 0.01), age (P = 0.003) and female gender (P = 0.04) were independent determinants of moderate to severe LVDD. AER (P = 0.003), age (P = 0.01) and male gender (P = 0.006) were directly and independently related to LVM.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>About half of asymptomatic type 2 diabetes patients have LVDD. Of those, more than one third display moderate LVDD pattern paralleled by increases in BNP, suggesting markedly increased risk of heart failure, especially in females, whereas AER and male sex are related to LVM.</p

Exploration of alternative splicing events in ten different grapevine cultivars

Background: The complex dynamics of gene regulation in plants are still far from being fully understood. Among many factors involved, alternative splicing (AS) in particular is one of the least well documented. For many years, AS has been considered of less relevant in plants, especially when compared to animals, however, since the introduction of next generation sequencing techniques the number of plant genes believed to be alternatively spliced has increased exponentially. Results: Here, we performed a comprehensive high-throughput transcript sequencing of ten different grapevine cultivars, which resulted in the first high coverage atlas of the grape berry transcriptome. We also developed findAS, a software tool for the analysis of alternatively spliced junctions. We demonstrate that at least 44 % of multi-exonic genes undergo AS and a large number of low abundance splice variants is present within the 131.622 splice junctions we have annotated from Pinot noir. Conclusions: Our analysis shows that similar to 70 % of AS events have relatively low expression levels, furthermore alternative splice sites seem to be enriched near the constitutive ones in some extent showing the noise of the splicing mechanisms. However, AS seems to be extensively conserved among the 10 cultivars

Quantum Simulations of Extended Hubbard Models with Dipolar Crystals

In this paper we study the realization of lattice models in mixtures of atomic and dipolar molecular quantum gases. We consider a situation where polar molecules form a self-assembled dipolar lattice, in which atoms or molecules of a second species can move and scatter. We describe the system dynamics in a master equation approach in the Brownian motion limit of slow particles and fast phonons, which we find appropriate for our system. In a wide regime of parameters, the reduced dynamics of the particles leads to physical realizations of extended Hubbard models with tuneable long-range interactions mediated by crystal phonons. This extends the notion of quantum simulation of strongly correlated systems with cold atoms and molecules to include phonon-dynamics, where all coupling parameters can be controlled by external fields.Comment: 44 pages, 14 figure