Autonomous Recovery Of Reconfigurable Logic Devices Using Priority Escalation Of Slack

Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices offer a suitable platform for survivable hardware architectures in mission-critical systems. In this dissertation, active dynamic redundancy-based fault-handling techniques are proposed which exploit the dynamic partial reconfiguration capability of SRAM-based FPGAs. Self-adaptation is realized by employing reconfiguration in detection, diagnosis, and recovery phases. To extend these concepts to semiconductor aging and process variation in the deep submicron era, resilient adaptable processing systems are sought to maintain quality and throughput requirements despite the vulnerabilities of the underlying computational devices. A new approach to autonomous fault-handling which addresses these goals is developed using only a uniplex hardware arrangement. It operates by observing a health metric to achieve Fault Demotion using Recon- figurable Slack (FaDReS). Here an autonomous fault isolation scheme is employed which neither requires test vectors nor suspends the computational throughput, but instead observes the value of a health metric based on runtime input. The deterministic flow of the fault isolation scheme guarantees success in a bounded number of reconfigurations of the FPGA fabric. FaDReS is then extended to the Priority Using Resource Escalation (PURE) online redundancy scheme which considers fault-isolation latency and throughput trade-offs under a dynamic spare arrangement. While deep-submicron designs introduce new challenges, use of adaptive techniques are seen to provide several promising avenues for improving resilience. The scheme developed is demonstrated by hardware design of various signal processing circuits and their implementation on a Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA device. These include a Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) core, Motion Estimation (ME) engine, Finite Impulse Response (FIR) Filter, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) blocks in addition to MCNC benchmark circuits. A iii significant reduction in power consumption is achieved ranging from 83% for low motion-activity scenes to 12.5% for high motion activity video scenes in a novel ME engine configuration. For a typical benchmark video sequence, PURE is shown to maintain a PSNR baseline near 32dB. The diagnosability, reconfiguration latency, and resource overhead of each approach is analyzed. Compared to previous alternatives, PURE maintains a PSNR within a difference of 4.02dB to 6.67dB from the fault-free baseline by escalating healthy resources to higher-priority signal processing functions. The results indicate the benefits of priority-aware resiliency over conventional redundancy approaches in terms of fault-recovery, power consumption, and resource-area requirements. Together, these provide a broad range of strategies to achieve autonomous recovery of reconfigurable logic devices under a variety of constraints, operating conditions, and optimization criteria

The Effect of Perceived Abusive Supervision on Employee Performance: Mediating Role of Employee State Paranoia

The aim of this study is to provide the management of private schools an insight into the complexity of psychological processes induced by abusive supervision hindering the performance of private school teachers. Teachers play an important role in the development of a child in particular and the society in general. With performance dependent on multiple internal and external factors, the internal psychological factors are critical as they serve as the building block of performance. However, in the employment relation scenario, these psychological factors are directly affected by the immediate supervisor’s behavior, therefore, implying the necessity to inform management strategies on monitor of supervisory behavior. Accordingly, the sample was selected from private sector schools in Rawalpindi and Islamabad Pakistan. Based on a total of 253 respondents, the results indicated that abusive supervision and employee task and contextual performances were affected by psychological process of paranoia. However, the relationship is more salient at the contextual performance level than at the task performance level. The study also provides implications and possible future directions for further empirical research in relation to contextualization

Islamic Formula of Future Value of Asset

Increasing price of an asset being sold on credit is a common practice of Islamic Financial Institutions (IFIs) and certain retailers using formulas of compound interest (Riba) and speculation (Maysir). As Islam prohibits both these both concepts, relevant literature was qualitatively probed to find Shariah compliant mechanism for setting future value of an asset being sold on credit negating Riba and Maysir. The study thus extracted a formula from authentic Shariah sources and presented it quantitatively as an alternate to abandon the conventional formulas of interest and speculation. It further contributed recommendations for credit sellers and buyers in the light of Shariah principles and possible future research

A multi-branch separable convolution neural network for pedestrian attribute recognition

© 2020 The Authors Computer science; Computer Vision; Image processing; Deep learning; Pedestrian attribute recognitio

Depthwise Separable Convolutional Neural Networks for Pedestrian Attribute Recognition

Video surveillance is ubiquitous. In addition to understanding various scene objects, extracting human visual attributes from the scene has attracted tremendous traction over the past many years. This is a challenging problem even for human observers. This is a multi-label problem, i.e., a subject in a scene can have multiple attributes that we are hoping to recognize, such as shoes types, clothing type, wearing some accessory, or carrying some object or not, etc. Solutions have been presented over the years and many researchers have employed convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In this work, we propose using Depthwise Separable Convolution Neural Network (DS-CNN) to solve the pedestrian attribute recognition problem. The network employs depthwise separable convolution layers (DSCL), instead of the regular 2D convolution layers. DS-CNN performs extremely well, especially with smaller datasets. In addition, with a compact network, DS-CNN reduces the number of trainable parameters while making learning efficient. We evaluated our method on two benchmark pedestrian datasets and results show improvements over the state of the art

Mapping the Spatial Deprivation of Pakistan

Geographical targeting may be a viable way to allocate resources for poverty alleviation in developing countries. Efficiency can be increased, and leakages to the nonpoor reduced substantially, by targeting needy areas. A national and regional database of substantial poverty maps or deprivation indices are not readily available in Pakistan. Further, existing activities of poverty alleviation are carried out on ad hoc basis in the absence of identified pockets of poverty. This paper presents indices of multiple deprivations based on the 1998 Population and Housing Census data. Possible applications of this exercise include identifying areas of need, making decisions on regional and sectoral priorities, facilitating targeted public interventions through special poverty alleviation programmes, understanding the relationship between poverty and its causes, and helping federal and provincial governments in determining financial awards.

Visual Pseudo Haptics for a Dynamic Squeeze / Grab Gesture in Immersive Virtual Reality

In this work, we analyze the suitability of employing visual feedback for pseudo haptics as a replacement for active haptics in an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment. A controller-free gesture interaction is widely considered to be a natural user interface in VR. As the controller is not employed, the lack of active haptic feedback can often result in a frustrating experience for complex dynamic gestures, e.g., grab, squeeze, clasp, etc. These actions are very easy to perform using specialized devices or controllers with active haptic feedback, e.g., data gloves with force feedback or controllers with analog triggers and vibrations can be utilized for immediate or continuous feedback. In contrast, these mechanisms are completely missing in a controller-free interaction. We present an on-screen visual mechanism as the pseudo haptic feedback of a dynamic squeeze/grab gesture to replace the active haptic feedback. Our proposed approach allows for the continuous visualization of a squeeze/grab gesture. We implemented an interaction mechanism to test the visualization for these dynamic gestures and compared it with a system with no pseudo haptics. The results from the user study show that an on-screen continuous visualization can be used as pseudo haptics for a dynamic squeeze/grab gesture in an immersive VR environment

PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES IN HERMAN HESSE’S SIDDHARTHA

This paper is an attempt to study Siddhartha’s spiritual quest for self-knowledge in psychological perspective. It is meant to explore how far and in what ways is the mystical experience on par with secondary integration of personality that occurs only in the wake of the disintegration of several existing psychological structures. The protagonist’s act of overcoming ego-consciousness and disassociating himself with the social labels and ultimately realizing his ‘self’ are analyzed psychologically using Kazimierz Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration as a conceptual framework. Herman Hesse’s novel Siddhartha is selected for the study, and textual analysis is employed as a tool to analyse the text culling the relevant passages as evidence. The study reveals that the protagonist of the novel achieves higher level of personality development and the previously held assumptions which confuse spirituality with psychic disorders are overruled. It also asserts the validity of mystical experiences as higher form of consciousness yielding wisdom allowing mystics to transcend the temporal cum spatial barriers thereby elevating to the level of humanity. This paper suggests that the study of different mystical traditions may well lead to one’s personal development and may prove a step towards gaining maturity.Keywords: Mysticism, mystical experience, self-realization, positive disintegration, secondary integration.  Cite as: Imran, M., Bhatti, A. G., & Naveed, R.T. (2018). Psychological analysis of mystical experiences in Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 3(2), 66-79. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol3iss2pp66-7