Le dialogue des juges européens, un jeu des références croisées un processus de co-construction judiciaire

Aquesta ponència forma part del Workshop internacional de doctorands organitzat pel Programa de Doctorat en Dret de la UAB i la Facultat de Dret de la UAB, amb el suport de l'École Européenne de Droit de l'Université Toulouse Capitol

Performance analysis and optimization of automatic speech recognition

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Fast and accurate Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is emerging as a key application for mobile devices. Delivering ASR on such devices is challenging due to the compute-intensive nature of the problem and the power constraints of embedded systems. In this paper, we provide a performance and energy characterization of Pocketsphinx, a popular toolset for ASR that targets mobile devices. We identify the computation of the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) as the main bottleneck, consuming more than 80 percent of the execution time. The CPI stack analysis shows that branches and main memory accesses are the main performance limiting factors for GMM computation. We propose several software-level optimizations driven by the power/performance analysis. Unlike previous proposals that trade accuracy for performance by reducing the number of Gaussians evaluated, we maintain accuracy and improve performance by effectively using the underlying CPU microarchitecture. First, we use a refactored implementation of the innermost loop of the GMM evaluation code to ameliorate the impact of branches. Second, we exploit the vector unit available on most modern CPUs to boost GMM computation, introducing a novel memory layout for storing the means and variances of the Gaussians in order to maximize the effectiveness of vectorization. Third, we compute the Gaussians for multiple frames in parallel, so means and variances can be fetched once in the on-chip caches and reused across multiple frames, significantly reducing memory bandwidth usage. We evaluate our optimizations using both hardware counters on real CPUs and simulations. Our experimental results show that the proposed optimizations provide 2.68x speedup over the baseline Pocketsphinx decoder on a high-end Intel Skylake CPU, while achieving 61 percent energy savings. On a modern ARM Cortex-A57 mobile processor our techniques improve performance by 1.85x, while providing 59 percent energy savings without any loss in the accuracy of the ASR system.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

White coat hypertension is not a benign entity: a cross-sectional study at a tertiary care hospital in Pakistan

OBJECTIVES: To determine the frequency of White Coat Hypertension in patients undergoing ambulatory blood pressure monitoring at a tertiary care center and to compare ambulatory blood pressure profiles of normotensives, white coat hypertensives and hypertensives.METHODS: A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted which included all adult patients undergoing ambulatory blood pressure monitoring over a 3-year period. Those patients with incomplete data, less than 85% successful BP readings and inadequate number of daytime and nighttime readings were excluded from the study. The data on ambulatory blood pressure monitoring comprised of demographics, blood pressure, pulse pressure and mean arterial pressure readings at every 30 minutes interval and also a graphical representation of patients\u27 24-hour blood pressure recording. SPSS was used for data analysis. Chi-square test and analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used for qualitative and quantitative variables respectively.RESULTS: A total of 277 patients with a mean age of 48.98 +/- 17.52 years were included. There were 189 (58%) males included in the study. Out of the total, 46 (16.6%) patients had White Coat Hypertension, 59 (21.3%) were Normotensive and 172 (62.1%) had Hypertension. The mean age of Normotensives was 40.80 +/- 14.11 years, White Coat Hypertensives was 37.72 +/- 14.58 years and Hypertensives was 54.80 +/- 16.76 years (

Safety-related challenges and opportunities for GPUs in the automotive domain

GPUs have been shown to cover the computing performance needs of autonomous driving (AD) systems. However, since the GPUs used for AD build on designs for the mainstream market, they may lack fundamental properties for correct operation under automotive's safety regulations. In this paper, we analyze some of the main challenges in hardware and software design to embrace GPUs as the reference computing solution for AD, with the emphasis in ISO 26262 functional safety requirements.Authors would like to thank Guillem Bernat from Rapita Systems for his technical feedback on this work. The research leading to this work has received funding from the European Re-search Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 772773). This work has also been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant TIN2015-65316-P and the HiPEAC Network of Excellence. Jaume Abella has been partially supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Ramon y Cajal postdoctoral fellowship number RYC-2013-14717. Carles Hernández is jointly funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and FEDER funds through grant TIN2014-60404-JIN.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Single-molecule study for a graphene-based nano-position sensor

In this study we lay the groundwork for a graphene-based fundamental ruler at the nanoscale. It relies on the efficient energy-transfer mechanism between single quantum emitters and low-doped graphene monolayers. Our experiments, conducted with dibenzoterrylene (DBT) molecules, allow going beyond ensemble analysis due to the emitter photo-stability and brightness. A quantitative characterization of the fluorescence decay-rate modification is presented and compared to a simple model, showing agreement with the $d^{-4}$ dependence, a genuine manifestation of a dipole interacting with a 2D material. With DBT molecules, we can estimate a potential uncertainty in position measurements as low as 5nm in the range below 30nm

Performance analysis and optimization of automotive GPUs

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Autonomous Driving (AD) have drastically increased the performance demands of automotive systems. Suitable highperformance platforms building upon Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) have been developed to respond to this demand, being NVIDIA Jetson TX2 a relevant representative. However, whether high-performance GPU configurations are appropriate for automotive setups remains as an open question. This paper aims at providing light on this question by modelling an automotive GPU (Jetson TX2), analyzing its microarchitectural parameters against relevant benchmarks, and identifying specific configurations able to meaningfully increase performance within similar cost envelopes, or to decrease costs preserving original performance levels. Overall, our analysis opens the door to the optimization of automotive GPUs for further system efficiency.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) under grant TIN2015-65316-P, the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 772773) and the HiPEAC Network of Excellence. Pedro Benedicte and Jaume Abella have been partially supported by the MINECO under FPU15/01394 grant and Ramon y Cajal postdoctoral fellowship number RYC-2013-14717 respectively and Leonidas Kosmidis under Juan de la Cierva-Formacin postdoctoral fellowship (FJCI-2017-34095).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

EXPLORING EMOTION REGULATION AND ALTRUISM WHEN EXPERIENCING COMPASSION FATIGUE FROM HUMANITARIAN CRISES, INCLUDING COVID- 19.

Despite knowledge of devastating statistics, it has been observed that when hundreds, or even millions are suffering in large-scale crises, including genocides, refugee crises, and more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, humans seem unable to process and comprehend the magnitude of that suffering on an emotional level. While the expectation is that compassion should increase proportionally with the number of people suffering in catastrophes, prior research has shown a negative relationship such that as need increases, donations decrease. Some factors that may impact this include the identifiable victim effect, use of emotion regulation strategies, specific cognitive processing styles, and compassion fatigue. This research sought to explore the impact of these factors on decision-making, judgment, and altruism, especially in the face of an ongoing, chronic, and collective trauma (COVID-19). A sample of 993 participants, primarily Caucasian, English-speaking individuals with a median age of 39-years-old, and with varying education levels, were presented with questions about demographics, COVID-19, use of emotion regulation strategies, and cognitive processing styles. Participants were randomized thrice into conditions for compassion fatigue, emotion regulation strategies, and COVID-19. They were, lastly, asked questions about compassion fatigue and desired donation amount towards a charity. The findings of this study showed that our participants experienced significantly higher levels of compassion fatigue and elected to donate higher amounts- contrary to previous research - which may be a result of this population being amidst an ongoing global catastrophe and trauma. In addition, we found that individuals who had contracted COVID-19 were more likely to donate to others due to the identifiable victim effect. We also found individual differences in how emotion regulation use moderated the connection between compassion fatigue and donation amount. Overall, our findings show the impact of COVID-19 and compassion fatigue on altruism; they also highlight the utility of emotion regulation strategies, whether reappraising thoughts or suppressing emotions, especially during a persisting trauma such as COVID-19. Exploring the impact of compassion fatigue on decision-making, judgment, and altruism is imperative, especially given how these factors affect humans on both a micro and macro scale in terms of global policy, immigration, economic reform, and healthcare

Automobile air bag inflation system based on fast combustion reaction

Current automobile air bag inflator technology is complex, expensive and environmentally unsafe. A new and novel air bag inflator based on fast combustion reactions of methane-oxygen mixtures has been developed and studied. The thermodynamics and mass flow parameters of this new inflator have been modeled and found to be in agreement with experimental results. The performance of the fast combustion inflator was evaluated in terms of pressure-time relationships inside the inflator and in a receiving tank simulating an air bag as well as the temperature-time relationship in the tank. In order to develop this fast combustion inflator, several critical issues were studied and evaluated. These included the effects of stoichiometry, initial mixture pressure and extreme hot and cold conditions. Other design and practical parameters, such as burst disk thickness and type, ignition device, tank purging gas, concentration of carbon monoxide produced and severity of temperature in the tank were also studied and optimized. Several inflator sizes were investigated and found to meet most of the requirements for a successful air bag inflator. A theoretical and integrated model has been developed to simulate the transient pressure and temperature as well as the mass flow rate from the inflator to the tank. The model is based on the change in the internal energy inside the inflator and the receiving tank as the mass flows from the inflator to the tank. The model utilizes the Chemical Equilibrium Compositions and Applications code developed by NASA to estimate the equilibrium conditions in the inflator. A large volume of experimental results made at different conditions were found to be in agreement with the integrated model. The fast combustion inflator developed during this research is simple in principle and construction and is environmentally attractive

Implementing a Health Leadership Program - Clinical Perspectives

A Health Leadership Program (HLP) was developed in Maine to equip healthcare students with essential knowledge and skills in reproductive health. This evaluation presents findings from a qualitative analysis that assessed the impact of HLP on healthcare students\u27 attitudes, beliefs, and clinical preparedness.https://dune.une.edu/ph_ile/1000/thumbnail.jp

PrésentationVers un cinquantenaire de la République du Vanuatu

À l’occasion du trentième anniversaire de la République du Vanuatu, la Société des Océanistes a souhaité consacrer un dossier thématique de son Journal à la situation actuelle et aux réalités contemporaines de ce pays. Qu’elle en soit remerciée. Car à ce jour, aucune de ses publications collectives n’avait encore été spécialement dédiée à l’existence et au devenir de ce jeune micro-État insulaire du Pacifique. Un dossier comparable avait été publié en 1956, mais c’était au cours d’une période..