Automated Synthesis of SEU Tolerant Architectures from OO Descriptions

SEU faults are a well-known problem in aerospace environment but recently their relevance grew up also at ground level in commodity applications coupled, in this frame, with strong economic constraints in terms of costs reduction. On the other hand, latest hardware description languages and synthesis tools allow reducing the boundary between software and hardware domains making the high-level descriptions of hardware components very similar to software programs. Moving from these considerations, the present paper analyses the possibility of reusing Software Implemented Hardware Fault Tolerance (SIHFT) techniques, typically exploited in micro-processor based systems, to design SEU tolerant architectures. The main characteristics of SIHFT techniques have been examined as well as how they have to be modified to be compatible with the synthesis flow. A complete environment is provided to automate the design instrumentation using the proposed techniques, and to perform fault injection experiments both at behavioural and gate level. Preliminary results presented in this paper show the effectiveness of the approach in terms of reliability improvement and reduced design effort

On applying the set covering model to reseeding

The Functional BIST approach is a rather new BIST technique based on exploiting embedded system functionality to generate deterministic test patterns during BIST. The approach takes advantages of two well-known testing techniques, the arithmetic BIST approach and the reseeding method. The main contribution of the present paper consists in formulating the problem of an optimal reseeding computation as an instance of the set covering problem. The proposed approach guarantees high flexibility, is applicable to different functional modules, and, in general, provides a more efficient test set encoding then previous techniques. In addition, the approach shorts the computation time and allows to better exploiting the tradeoff between area overhead and global test length as well as to deal with larger circuits

Computational intelligence based architecture for cognitive agents

AbstractWe discuss some limitations of reflexive agents to motivate the need to develop cognitive agents and propose a hierarchical, layered, architecture for cognitive agents. Our examples often involve the discussion of cognitive agents in highway traffic models. A cognitive agent is an agent capable of performing cognitive acts, i.e. a sequence of the following activities: “Perceiving” information in the environment and provided by other agents, “Reasoning” about this information using existing knowledge, “Judging” the obtained information using existing knowledge, “Responding” to other cognitive agents or to the external environment, as it may be required, and “Learning”, i.e. changing (and, hopefully augmenting) the existing knowledge if the newly acquired information allows it. We describe how computational intelligence techniques (e.g., fuzzy logic, neural networks, genetic algorithms, etc) allow mimicking to a certain extent the cognitive acts performed by human beings. The order with which the cognitive actions take place is important and so is the order with which the various computational intelligence techniques are applied. We believe that a hierarchical layered model should be defined for the generic cognitive agents in a style akin to the hierarchical OSI 7 layer model used in data communication. We outline in broad sense such a reference model

C3C^{3} : A Command-line Catalogue Cross-matching tool for modern astrophysical survey data

In the current data-driven science era, it is needed that data analysis techniques has to quickly evolve to face with data whose dimensions has increased up to the Petabyte scale. In particular, being modern astrophysics based on multi-wavelength data organized into large catalogues, it is crucial that the astronomical catalog cross-matching methods, strongly dependant from the catalogues size, must ensure efficiency, reliability and scalability. Furthermore, multi-band data are archived and reduced in different ways, so that the resulting catalogues may differ each other in formats, resolution, data structure, etc, thus requiring the highest generality of cross-matching features. We present $C^{3}$ (Command-line Catalogue Cross-match), a multi-platform application designed to efficiently cross-match massive catalogues from modern surveys. Conceived as a stand-alone command-line process or a module within generic data reduction/analysis pipeline, it provides the maximum flexibility, in terms of portability, configuration, coordinates and cross-matching types, ensuring high performance capabilities by using a multi-core parallel processing paradigm and a sky partitioning algorithm.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, proceedings of the IAU-325 symposium on Astroinformatics, Cambridge University pres

Machine learning based data mining for Milky Way filamentary structures reconstruction

We present an innovative method called FilExSeC (Filaments Extraction, Selection and Classification), a data mining tool developed to investigate the possibility to refine and optimize the shape reconstruction of filamentary structures detected with a consolidated method based on the flux derivative analysis, through the column-density maps computed from Herschel infrared Galactic Plane Survey (Hi-GAL) observations of the Galactic plane. The present methodology is based on a feature extraction module followed by a machine learning model (Random Forest) dedicated to select features and to classify the pixels of the input images. From tests on both simulations and real observations the method appears reliable and robust with respect to the variability of shape and distribution of filaments. In the cases of highly defined filament structures, the presented method is able to bridge the gaps among the detected fragments, thus improving their shape reconstruction. From a preliminary "a posteriori" analysis of derived filament physical parameters, the method appears potentially able to add a sufficient contribution to complete and refine the filament reconstruction.Comment: Proceeding of WIRN 2015 Conference, May 20-22, Vietri sul Mare, Salerno, Italy. Published in Smart Innovation, Systems and Technology, Springer, ISSN 2190-3018, 9 pages, 4 figure

An asymptomatic detachment of the appendix evolved to giant abscess and complete colliquative necrosis: pivotal role of computed tomography in patient management

Acute appendicitis (AA) is one of the most common causes of acute abdominal pain and it generally affects young males in the second or third decade of their life. Due to its often insidious presentations, the diagnosis is challenging and, if delayed, can lead to life-threatening complications. This report describes a rare case of an almost asymptomatic complicated appendicitis caused by an appendicolith followed by spontaneous detachment of the vermiform appendix and its complete colliquative necrosis with abscess formation. Thus far this is the first case of spontaneous appendix avulsion in an adult where the appendix is entirely colliquated into an abscess

Prosodia e marcatori discorsivi: problemi di acquisizione in italiano L2

È risaputo che i parlanti possono riconoscere le lingue sulla base delle caratteristiche prosodiche e che i bambini nativi di una lingua acquisiscono queste caratteristiche prosodiche fin dai primi giorni di vita (Chini 2016:344). Senza dubbio, gli apprendenti di una lingua straniera incontrano molte difficoltà nell’acquisizione della prosodia per le interferenze derivanti dalla propria L1; queste difficoltà si accentuano nel caso degli apprendenti di lingue affini come l’italiano, il francese e lo spagnolo. L’influenza della lingua materna sulla lingua target è maggiore in questi casi e la percezione delle similitudini interviene in modo determinante nella creazione, da parte dell’apprendente, di strategie di acquisizione che corrono il rischio di fossilizzarsi a livello della stuttura prosodica (Romero Trillo 2002: 782). La prosodia può trasmettere sfumature di significato attraverso l’intonazione e l’accento, quindi, una conoscenza poco sufficiente della prosodia di una L2 può rendere difficoltosa la comprensione e l’interpretazione della produzione linguistica di un apprendente. Il livello prosodico di una lingua è quello maggiormente suscettibile alle interferenze della L1 e a fenomeni di fossilizzazione, tanto nella percezione che nella produzione; inoltre, questi transfers ed errori possono avere un forte impatto nella comprensione e nel giudizio di accettabilità da parte dei parlanti nativi. Per questo motivo, si considera necessario approfondire questo aspetto della linguistica acquisizionale che nel caso dell’italiano non ha ricevuto ancora sufficiente attenzione. L’obiettivo di questa tesi di dottorato è lo studio del processo acquisizionale della prosodia da parte di apprendenti ispanofoni e francofoni di italiano L2. Lo studio si limiterà all’analisi della realizzazione prosodica di tre marcatori del discorso: ma, perché, anche. Data l’importanza che la prosodia riveste nell’interazione conversazionale, abbiamo voluto dare un ulteriore contributo agli studi già esistenti su questo tema utilizzando l’analisi acustica e contrastiva di questi marcatori discorsivi prodotti dai nativi italiani e da apprendenti ispanofoni e francofoni..

On integrating a proprietary and a commercial architecture for optimal BIST performances in SoCs

This paper presents the integration of a proprietary hierarchical and distributed test access mechanism called HD2BIST and a BIST insertion commercial tool. The paper briefly describes the architecture and the features of both the environments and it presents some experimental results obtained on an industrial So