42995338
Assembly Language as Object Code
The set of meanings that may be encoded in most object languages is a subset of the meanings that may be encoded in most assembly languages. Careful exploitation of this fact in the design of the SMAL assembly and object language allows the SMAL assembler itself to be used as a linkage editor, thus eliminating the need for an expensive and often misunderstood system program. The SMAL assembler is no more complex than many assemblers in common use today, nor are the relevant aspects of the SMAL language particularly unique.
18506033
Evaluation of voting systems
T he recent spate of security issues and allegations of " lost votes " in the U.S. demonstrates the inadequacy of the standards used to evaluate our election systems. The current standards (the FEC Voting Systems Standards) along with the revision being developed by IEEE 1583 (see the article by Deutsch and Berger in last month's Communications) are poor from another perspective: they establish a single pass/fail threshold for all systems, thereby eliminating incentives for existing suppliers to improve their products and rendering the market unattractive to new entrants. Moreover, they fail to precisely define the properties that should be required of a voting system. Instead, the standards rely on specific designs that are more than 15 years old. These legacy designs handicap promising new approaches, such as the various voter-verified printing schemes. New systems are unnecessarily burdened, while their substantial advantages go unrecognized. A set of well-defined properties would encourage the development and commercialization of better voting systems, especially when combined with objective ways to measure performance with respect to those properties. The overall result would then resemble the quantitative federal ratings for automobiles , where features such as vehicle safety and fuel efficiency form a basis for Consumer Reports-style comparative tables. Similarly, specific performance rating guidelines for different aspects of voting systems would provide meaningful metrics upon which system developers could compete. Decision makers, both regulatory and purchasing, would then be free to establish their own minimums for these metrics. Such a rating system can thus cleanly disentangle the development of the technical evaluation process from the various political and regulatory processes. asked the technical community for assistance in determining a new standard. This community is no stranger to the area of voting system properties and standards: a number of authors have tried to characterize requirements , and, in 2002, the Workshop on Election Standards and Technology addressed similar issues. The performance properties for voting systems might include the following: integrity of the votes (both voter verification, " I can check that my vote was captured correctly " and public verification, " anyone can check that all recorded votes were counted correctly "); ballot secrecy (both voter privacy and resistance to vote selling and coercion); robustness (including resistance to denial of service attacks); usability and accuracy (including access for the disabled); and transparency (both of mechanism and election data). The inherent differences in system architectures can be characterized …
1963957
Fast and efficient searches for effective optimization-phase sequences
It has long been known that a fixed ordering of optimization phases will not produce the best code for every application. One approach for addressing this phase-ordering problem is to use an evolutionary algorithm to search for a specific sequence of phases for each module or function. While such searches have been shown to produce more efficient code, the approach can be extremely slow because the application is compiled and possibly executed to evaluate each sequence's effectiveness. Consequently, evolutionary or iterative compilation schemes have been promoted for compilation systems targeting embedded applications where meeting strict constraints on execution time, code size, and power consumption is paramount and longer compilation times may be tolerated in the final stage of development, when an application is compiled one last time and embedded in a product. Unfortunately, even for small embedded applications, the search process can take many hours or even days making the approach less attractive to developers. In this paper, we describe two complementary general approaches for achieving faster searches for effective optimization sequences when using a genetic algorithm. The first approach reduces the search time by avoiding unnecessary executions of the application when possible. Results indicate search time reductions of 62%, on average, often reducing searches from hours to minutes. The second approach modifies the search so fewer generations are required to achieve the same results. Measurements show this approach decreases the average number of required generations by 59%. These improvements have the potential for making evolutionary compilation a viable choice for tuning embedded applications.
27407130
Wavelet-based 2-D multichannel signal estimation
In this paper, we present a new wavelet-based estimator for 2-D multichannel signals. Estimation of a 2-D multichannel signal relies on the ability to decorrelate the signal in both space and channel. The new estimator we present uses a 2-D discrete wavelet transform to approximately decorrelate the signal in space, allowing for efficient estimation of both stationary and nonstationary signals. When channel correlation is unknown, but depends only on channel separation, the DFT may be utilized to decorrelate the channel efficiently. In contrast to the optimal estimation scheme, our new estimator does not require second-order signal statistics, making it well suited to many applications. In addition to providing vastly improved visual quality, the new estimator typically yields signal-to-noise ratio gains of over 12 dB.
26900731
A new organization for a perceptron-based branch predictor and its FPGA implementation
An unaltered rearrangement of the original computation of a neural based predictor at the algorithmic level is introduced as a new organization. Its FPGA implementation generates circuits that are 1.7 faster than a direct implementation of the original algorithm. This faster clock rate allows to implement predictors with longer history lengths using the nearly the same hardware budget.
17288038
The PSIPRED protein structure prediction server
SUMMARY
The PSIPRED protein structure prediction server allows users to submit a protein sequence, perform a prediction of their choice and receive the results of the prediction both textually via e-mail and graphically via the web. The user may select one of three prediction methods to apply to their sequence: PSIPRED, a highly accurate secondary structure prediction method; MEMSAT 2, a new version of a widely used transmembrane topology prediction method; or GenTHREADER, a sequence profile based fold recognition method.


AVAILABILITY
Freely available to non-commercial users at http://globin.bio.warwick.ac.uk/psipred/
413264
Phonetic Speaker Recognition with Support Vector Machines
A recent area of significant progress in speaker recognition is the use of high level features—idiolect, phonetic relations, prosody, discourse structure, etc. A speaker not only has a distinctive acoustic sound but uses language in a characteristic manner. Large corpora of speech data available in recent years allow experimentation with long term statistics of phone patterns, word patterns, etc. of an individual. We propose the use of support vector machines and term frequency analysis of phone sequences to model a given speaker. To this end, we explore techniques for text categorization applied to the problem. We derive a new kernel based upon a linearization of likelihood ratio scoring. We introduce a new phone-based SVM speaker recognition approach that halves the error rate of conventional phone-based approaches.