Optimising and evaluating designs for reconfigurable hardware

Growing demand for computational performance, and the rising cost for chip design and manufacturing make reconfigurable hardware increasingly attractive for digital system implementation. Reconfigurable hardware, such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), can deliver performance through parallelism while also providing flexibility to enable application builders to reconfigure them. However, reconfigurable systems, particularly those involving run-time reconfiguration, are often developed in an ad-hoc manner. Such an approach usually results in low designer productivity and can lead to inefficient designs. This thesis covers three main achievements that address this situation. The first achievement is a model that captures design parameters of reconfigurable hardware and performance parameters of a given application domain. This model supports optimisations for several design metrics such as performance, area, and power consumption. The second achievement is a technique that enhances the relocatability of bitstreams for reconfigurable devices, taking into account heterogeneous resources. This method increases the flexibility of modules represented by these bitstreams while reducing configuration storage size and design compilation time. The third achievement is a technique to characterise the power consumption of FPGAs in different activity modes. This technique includes the evaluation of standby power and dedicated low-power modes, which are crucial in meeting the requirements for battery-based mobile devices

Bidding in common value fair division games: The winner's curse or even worse?

A unique indivisible commodity with an unknown common value is owned by group of individuals and should be allocated to one of them while compensating the others monetarily. We study the so-called fair division game (Güth, Ivanova-Stenzel, Königstein, and Strobel (2002, 2005)) theoretically and experimentally for the common value case and compare our results to the corresponding common value auction. Whereas symmetric risk neutral Nash equilibria are rather similar for both games, behavior differs strikingly. Implementing auctions and fair division games in the lab in a repeated setting under first- and second-price rule, we find that overall behavior is much more dispersed for the fair division games than for the auctions. Winners' profit margins and shading rates are on average slightly lower for the fair division game. Moreover, we find that behavior in the fair division game separates into extreme over- and underbidding.common value auction, winner's curse, fair division game

Theatrical touring companies and amateur dramatics in colonial India

This article argues that theatre in colonial India-both in the form of touring companies and amateur dramatics-offered much more than mere entertainment: first, it was an important social space where the British diaspora constituted itself as a community. Secondly, it served as a lifeline to the home country. By watching theatrical performances either brought to them straight from London or which they performed themselves, colonial Britons felt in touch with their homeland. Finally, theatre not only allowed colonial audiences to participate in the metropolitan culture; it inadvertently helped to unify the British empire. Whether living in London, the provinces, or a colonial city, all British subjects consumed the same popular culture, forming in effect one big taste community. Theatre, therefore, lends itself to a discussion of central issues of imperial history, as, for example, the relationship between the metropolitan centre and the imperial periphery, the colonial public sphere, social and racial hierarchies, the perception of the 'Other', and processes of cross-cultural exchange and appropriation

The integrability of ESG investing into robo advising

Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing and passive asset management are two distinct trends in financial markets. This research examines whether robo advisors can combine these two trends by integrating ESG into their passively managed portfolios. On the example of the ESG portfolio of a German robo advisor, the research finds that ESG is integrable into robo advising, with limitations. A backtest with a threshold-based rebalancing strategy was performed over the sample period 05/31/2011 – 10/31/2018. In comparison to its Non-ESG counterpart, the ESG portfolio does not over- or underperform. Also, its ESG scores are higher. However, the analysis of a second robo advisor shows the limited integrability of ESG into different portfolios due to a lack of available ESG ETFs and inconsistencies in ESG scores

Prediction of nitrogen purification in wastewater with Machine learning

Wastewater treatment plants are necessary for avoiding environmental pollution by humans. Last year the European Commission proposed a new directive with stricter requirements for wastewater treatment plants. To meet the proposed regulatory changes regarding the allowed amount of pollution, many wastewater treatment plants need expensive facility upgrades. These upgrades may increase land use. Additionally, the taxpayers will most likely have to pay for the expenses related to meet the new requirements for the wastewater treatment plants. One possible solution for reducing the cost and land use could be to optimize the processes used today with new technology. This study will investigate if it is possible to use machine learning to predict the amount of nitrate contained in the wastewater after denitrification. For this purpose, historical data from two different denitrification processes from one wastewater treatment plant is utilized. The first process dosed methanol based on measurements of nitrate, oxygen, and flow before denitrification, while the second process dosed methanol based on measurements of nitrate, oxygen, and flow before denitrification and previous nitrate out measurements. The data were collected between 30.11.2022 and 05.01.2023. One statistical approach and two machine learning models were tested for predicting the amount of nitrate contained in the wastewater after denitrification. The statistical method is a seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average with exogenous variables (SARIMAX) and the machine learning approaches are the long short term memory (LSTM) and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) algorithms. For the first process all models showed similar results with SARIMAX as the best model with an MSE, RMSE and MAE of 0.15, 0.39 and 0.29 respectively. For the second process the SARIMAX model outperformed the LSTM and XGBoost with MSE,RMSE and MAE of 2.09, 1.45 and 1.24 respectively. Our research show that it is significantly easier to get good performing models for process one than two. We are presenting some aspects which should be further investigated to obtain a solution that is ready to be put into use

Conserved substitution patterns around nucleosome footprints in eukaryotes and Archaea derive from frequent nucleosome repositioning through evolution.

Nucleosomes, the basic repeat units of eukaryotic chromatin, have been suggested to influence the evolution of eukaryotic genomes, both by altering the propensity of DNA to mutate and by selection acting to maintain or exclude nucleosomes in particular locations. Contrary to the popular idea that nucleosomes are unique to eukaryotes, histone proteins have also been discovered in some archaeal genomes. Archaeal nucleosomes, however, are quite unlike their eukaryotic counterparts in many respects, including their assembly into tetramers (rather than octamers) from histone proteins that lack N- and C-terminal tails. Here, we show that despite these fundamental differences the association between nucleosome footprints and sequence evolution is strikingly conserved between humans and the model archaeon Haloferax volcanii. In light of this finding we examine whether selection or mutation can explain concordant substitution patterns in the two kingdoms. Unexpectedly, we find that neither the mutation nor the selection model are sufficient to explain the observed association between nucleosomes and sequence divergence. Instead, we demonstrate that nucleosome-associated substitution patterns are more consistent with a third model where sequence divergence results in frequent repositioning of nucleosomes during evolution. Indeed, we show that nucleosome repositioning is both necessary and largely sufficient to explain the association between current nucleosome positions and biased substitution patterns. This finding highlights the importance of considering the direction of causality between genetic and epigenetic change

THE TIME OF POLITICS, THE POLITICS OF TIME, AND POLITICIZED TIME: AN INTRODUCTION TO CHRONOPOLITICS

Time is so deeply interwoven with all aspects of politics that its centrality to the political is frequently overlooked. For one, politics has its own times and rhythms. Secondly, time can be an object and an instrument of politics. Thirdly, temporal attributes are used not only to differentiate basic political principles but also to legitimize or delegitimize politics. Finally, politics aims at realizing futures in the present or preventing them from materializing. Consequently, the relationship between politics and time encompasses a broad spectrum of phenomena and processes that cry out for historicization. In our introduction to this History and Theory theme issue on chronopolitics, we argue that the concept of chronopolitics makes it possible to do this and, in the process, to move the operation of rethinking historical temporalities from the periphery toward the center of historiographical attention as well as to engage in a dialogue with scholars from a wide range of disciplines. To this end, we propose a broad concept of chronopolitics by discussing existing definitions, by distinguishing between three central dimensions of chronopolitics (the time of politics, the politics of time, and politicized time), and by systematizing possible approaches to studying chronopolitics

Teachers’ judgement accuracy of word problems and influencing task features

The ability to judge accurately the difficulty of mathematical tasks is considered as a central facet of the diagnostic competence of mathematics teachers. An underlying reason is that the accurate judgement of task difficulty is the basis for achieving an optimal level of instruction for the learning group. Although a lot of studies have already investigated the judgement accuracy and the influence of additional factors, like teacher knowledge, there is a lack of a detailed look at the task features as possible influencing factors. Therefore, in the present study, we first investigated the judgement accuracy of word problems with fractions. Afterwards, by means of theoretical varied task features and an empirical study with 153 6th graders as well as 64 prospective teachers, we explored differences in the tasks regarding the judgement accuracy.This research was funded by the Ministry of Science, Research and Arts of Baden-Wuerttemberg within the Research Training Group “Diagnostic Competences of Teachers”