Artificial life: Discipline or method? Report on a debate held at ECAL99

How can artificial life (AL) advance scientific understanding? Is AL best seen as a new discipline, or as a collection of novel computational methods that can be applied to old problems? And given that the products of AL research range from abstract existence proofs to working robots to detailed simulation models, are there standards of quality or usefulness that can be applied across the whole field? On September 16th, 1999 in Lausanne, Switzerland, a debate on these questions was held as part of the Fifth European Conference on Artificial Life. As the organizers, we wanted to foster a constructive discussion regarding the scientific status, and future, of AL. We were well aware that some of these issues had been raised before (e.g., Miller [2]) but we felt that earlier treatments had perhaps not reached a wide enough audience. The format for the debate consisted of contributions from invited panelists followed by an open discussion. The panelists were Chris Langton, Mark Bedau, Simon Kirby, and Inman Harvey—Hiroaki Kitano was scheduled to participate but regrettably could not attend the conference

A FPGA-Based Reconfigurable Software Architecture for Highly Dependable Systems

Nowadays, systems-on-chip are commonly equipped with reconfigurable hardware. The use of hybrid architectures based on a mixture of general purpose processors and reconfigurable components has gained importance across the scientific community allowing a significant improvement of computational performance. Along with the demand for performance, the great sensitivity of reconfigurable hardware devices to physical defects lead to the request of highly dependable and fault tolerant systems. This paper proposes an FPGA-based reconfigurable software architecture able to abstract the underlying hardware platform giving an homogeneous view of it. The abstraction mechanism is used to implement fault tolerance mechanisms with a minimum impact on the system performanc

Arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy associated with severe left ventricular involvement in a cat.

An 8-year-old, 4 kg, intact female, domestic shorthaired cat was referred for tachypnea and pleural effusion. A 24-h Holter recording showed numerous polymorphic ventricular premature complexes with left and right bundle branch block morphology. Echocardiographic examination revealed right atrial and ventricular dilation. The right ventricular free wall was thin and aneurysmal. The cat died 10 days after initiation of antiarrhythmic therapy. Gross and histopathological findings were consistent with arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC) associated with severe left ventricular involvement

Pancreatic cystosis in cystic fibrosis. Sometimes a bike ride can help you decide

Pancreatic cystosis (PC) is an uncommon manifestation of pancreas involvement in cystic fibrosis (CF), characterized by the presence of multiple macrocysts partially or completely replacing pancreas. Only few reports are available from literature and management (surgery vs follow up) is commonly based on the presence of symptoms or complications due to local mass effect, although evidence-based recommendations are still not available. We here report the case of a young adult CF patient with PC, in which cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) provided important information to be integrated to the radiological finding of inferior vena cava compression by the multicystic pancreas complex. Through the analysis of oxygen kinetic cardiodynamic phase pattern, CPET may be helpful to safely exclude significant mass effects on blood venous return and to improve the decision-making process on whether to consider surgery or not in patients with PC

A novel universal device "LINGUAL RING Ri.P.A.Ra" for TMDs and cranio-cervico-mandibular pains: preliminary results of a randomized control clinical trial

The aim of this study was to evaluate functionality and clinical application of a novel immediate device in the treatment of temporomandibular disorders (TMDs). To address the research purpose, authors developed and implemented a randomized control clinical trial

Influence of parasitic capacitance variations on 65 nm and 32 nm predictive technology model SRAM core-cells

The continuous improving of CMOS technology allows the realization of digital circuits and in particular static random access memories that, compared with previous technologies, contain an impressive number of transistors. The use of new production processes introduces a set of parasitic effects that gain more and more importance with the scaling down of the technology. In particular, even small variations of parasitic capacitances in CMOS devices are expected to become an additional source of faulty behaviors in future technologies. This paper analyzes and compares the effect of parasitic capacitance variations in a SRAM memory circuit realized with 65 nm and 32 nm predictive technology model

Automating defects simulation and fault modeling for SRAMs

The continues improvement in manufacturing process density for very deep sub micron technologies constantly leads to new classes of defects in memory devices. Exploring the effect of fabrication defects in future technologies, and identifying new classes of realistic functional fault models with their corresponding test sequences, is a time consuming task up to now mainly performed by hand. This paper proposes a new approach to automate this procedure. The proposed method exploits the capabilities of evolutionary algorithms to automatically identify faulty behaviors into defective memories and to define the corresponding fault models and relevant test sequences. Target defects are modeled at the electrical level in order to optimize the results to the specific technology and memory architecture

A Sharing- and Competition-Aware Framework for Cellular Network Evolution Planning

Mobile network operators are facing the difficult task of significantly increasing capacity to meet projected demand while keeping CAPEX and OPEX down. We argue that infrastructure sharing is a key consideration in operators' planning of the evolution of their networks, and that such planning can be viewed as a stage in the cognitive cycle. In this paper, we present a framework to model this planning process while taking into account both the ability to share resources and the constraints imposed by competition regulation (the latter quantified using the Herfindahl index). Using real-world demand and deployment data, we find that the ability to share infrastructure essentially moves capacity from rural, sparsely populated areas (where some of the current infrastructure can be decommissioned) to urban ones (where most of the next-generation base stations would be deployed), with significant increases in resource efficiency. Tight competition regulation somewhat limits the ability to share but does not entirely jeopardize those gains, while having the secondary effect of encouraging the wider deployment of next-generation technologies

Using ER Models for Microprocessor Functional Test Coverage Evaluation

Test coverage evaluation is one of the most critical issues in microprocessor software-based testing. Whenever the test is developed in the absence of a structural model of the microprocessor, the evaluation of the final test coverage may become a major issue. In this paper, we present a microprocessor modeling technique based on entity-relationship diagrams allowing the definition and the computation of custom coverage functions. The proposed model is very flexible and particularly effective when a structural model of the microprocessor is not availabl