Towards Accurate and High-Speed Spiking Neuromorphic Systems with Data Quantization-Aware Deep Networks

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have gained immense success in cognitive applications and greatly pushed today's artificial intelligence forward. The biggest challenge in executing DNNs is their extremely data-extensive computations. The computing efficiency in speed and energy is constrained when traditional computing platforms are employed in such computational hungry executions. Spiking neuromorphic computing (SNC) has been widely investigated in deep networks implementation own to their high efficiency in computation and communication. However, weights and signals of DNNs are required to be quantized when deploying the DNNs on the SNC, which results in unacceptable accuracy loss. %However, the system accuracy is limited by quantizing data directly in deep networks deployment. Previous works mainly focus on weights discretize while inter-layer signals are mainly neglected. In this work, we propose to represent DNNs with fixed integer inter-layer signals and fixed-point weights while holding good accuracy. We implement the proposed DNNs on the memristor-based SNC system as a deployment example. With 4-bit data representation, our results show that the accuracy loss can be controlled within 0.02% (2.3%) on MNIST (CIFAR-10). Compared with the 8-bit dynamic fixed-point DNNs, our system can achieve more than 9.8x speedup, 89.1% energy saving, and 30% area saving.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Event-plane decorrelation over pseudo-rapidity and its effect on azimuthal anisotropy measurement in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Within A Multi-Phase Transport model, we investigate decorrelation of event planes over pseudorapidity and its effect on azimuthal anisotropy measurements in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The decorrelation increases with increasing {\eta} gap between particles used to reconstruct the event planes. The third harmonic event planes are found even anticorrelated between forward and backward rapidities, the source of which may root in the opposite orientation of the collision geometry triangularities. The decorrelation may call into question the anisotropic flow measurements with pseudorapidity gap designed to reduce nonflow contributions, hence the hydrodynamic properties of the quark-gluon plasma extracted from those measurements.Comment: 5 pages,4figure

Enhanced Channel Estimation Algorithm for Dedicated Short-Range Communication Systems

The Dedicated Short-Range Communication (DSRC) has been widely accepted as a promising wireless technology for enhancing traffic safety. In such DSRC-based vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication systems, because of the extremely time-varying characteristic of wireless propagation channels, accurate channel estimation is essential for reliable information exchange between vehicles. In this paper, the characteristics of the propagation channel and several traditional channel estimation schemes for V2V communications are reviewed. Then, a delay-based channel-frequency-response decomposition scheme is proposed to estimate and predict the double-selective V2V channel while adhering to the IEEE 802.11p standard. The proposed method achieves a more favorable performance than the traditional methods in V2V scenarios by combining the least square estimation in the frequency domain with the linear prediction in time domain. The performance advantages of the proposed scheme are verified by the simulation results from three typical scenarios. Furthermore, a reference design on a field-programmable gate array for the proposed channel estimation scheme is presented for the purpose of demonstrating its implementation feasibility and complexity