Off-chip buses consume a huge fraction (20%-40%) of the system power. Hence, techniques such as increasing bus widths, transition encoding etc. have been used for power reduction on off-chip data buses. Since capacitances at the I/O pads and interwire capacitances contribute significantly to increase in power, encoding/decoding schemes have been developed to reduce switching activity of the off-chip bus lines, thus reducing power. Frequent-Value Encoding(FVE) [1], Frequent Value Encoding with Xor (FVExor) [1] and VALVE [2] are some of the better known encoding schemes but they still have scope for improvement. This thesis addresses the problem of power reduction in off-chip data buses by encoding variable number (1 to 4) of fixed-size (32-bit) data values (variable length patterns) which exhibit temporal locality. This characteristic enables us to cache these patterns using 64-entry CAM at the encoder and 64-entry SRAM at the decoder. Whenever a pattern match occurs a 2-bit code indicating the index of the match is sent. If a variable length pattern match occurs then the code and unmatched portion of data is sent. We implemented our scheme, Variable Length Pattern Coding (VLPC) for various integer and floating point benchmarks and have seen 6% to 49% encodable patterns in these benchmarks. Based on the experiments on simplescalar and our analysis in MATLAB, we obtained 4.88% to 40.11% reduction in transition activity for SPEC2000 benchmarks such as crafty, swim, mcf, applu, ammp etc. over unencoded data. This is 0.3% to 38.9% higher than that obtained using FVE, FVExor [1] and VALVE [2] encoding schemes. Finally, we have designed a low-power custom CAM and SRAM using 45nm BSIM4 technology models which has been used to verify lower latency of data matching and storing.

The distribution, behaviours, and composition of dusky dolphin (Lagenorhynchus obscurus) nursery groups off Kaikoura, New Zealand, were examined. Data were collected during January–May 2005 and December 2005–April 2006 by systematic boat based surveys, group focal follows and photo-identification techniques. A total of 99 nursery groups were encountered on survey. Nursery groups were encountered in shallow water (<20 m) significantly more often than in deeper water (>20 m). Other group types (large groups, mating groups, adult non-mating groups) were not found in shallow water significantly more often than in deeper water. By staying in the shallower water, nursery groups may be protected from aggressive conspecifics and predators. More boats, especially private recreational boats, were found in the shallower waters, indicating that nursery groups are at greater risk from encounters with boat motors or recreational fishing gear in such areas. Group focal follows of at least 30- minutes were conducted on 56 nursery groups. Calves engaged in significantly more high energy behaviours (displays and head first re-entries) than non-calves in nursery groups. These groups were predominantly resting and compactly organized (interanimal distance less than 1 adult body length). Nursery groups showed a high level of synchrony, with 44% of groups synchronizing their submergence and surfacings for most of the focal follow. Median group size was 14, with a minimum of 2 mother-calf pairs to a maximum of 50 mother-calf pairs. A total of 260 individuals were catalogued as members of nursery groups during the two field seasons. Of these, 112 individuals were seen in nursery groups on at least two different days. Some individuals photographed with young calves in nursery groups off Kaikoura were later photographed in Admiralty Bay, 275 km northwest of Kaikoura. Other individuals photographed together in nursery groups in 2005 were also together in nursery groups in 2006.

The purpose of this research is to expand knowledge regarding the presence and quality of expression of certain place-making patterns that contribute to place being experienced as sacred. The results are intended to validate and make available an assessment method based on pattern presence and pattern quality for determining whether a specific built environment is more likely to be experienced as sacred or secular. In addition, the results are intended to provide architects with research-informed design guidelines for sacred place-making. This research explores the difference in the presence and quality of expression of certain placemaking patterns at two selected sacred and secular buildings, i.e., Rothko Chapel and Contemporary Arts Museum, both in Houston, Texas. Two key literature references were used as a basis for identifying place-making patterns used in this research: 1) Sacred Place: The Presence of Archetypal Patterns in Place Creation, authored by Phillip Tabb in 1996; and 2) Using the Place-Creation Myth to Develop Design Guidelines for Sacred Space, authored by Michael Brill in 1985. Three types of data were collected and analyzed: graphical data, questionnaire data, and focus group discussion data. Graphical data included photographs and sketches with field notes. A total of forty-eight (48) questionnaires (24 at each setting) were administered to twenty-four (24) Houston architects at the selected buildings. The focus group discussion panel consisted of 6 participants – three architects and three spiritual mentors from Houston, Texas. Relative frequencies were calculated for multiplechoice answers in the questionnaire, while open ended questionnaire items were subjected to inductive content analysis. Focus group discussion data was examined and coded by means of open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. The analyzed data were synthesized to test whether the presence and quality of expression of certain place-making patterns contributed to place being experienced as sacred. This study concludes that built environments which possess a higher presence and higher quality of expression of certain place-making patterns are more likely to be experienced as sacred than built environments with a lower presence and lower quality of expression of the place-making patterns. A set of design guidelines for sacred place-making were produced and a place-making pattern matrix was developed as part of this study.

The Common Moorhen (Gallinula chloropus) is a member of the rail family that usually inhabits slow moving or still bodies of water and can spread relatively rapidly and colonize a wide range of habitats. This species is a common resident bird, but a study of its basic ecology has not been published in Taiwan. The objective of this study was to examine the Common Moorhen¡¦s general breeding biology, as well as its diurnal activity patterns. I also made an attempt to describe its breeding behavior and time course. The possibility of morphometric characters difference between the male and female of the species was also examined. The study was conducted from December 2003 to May 2005 in Tainan county and Kaosiung Zhouzai wetland park. The majority of Common Moorhen breeding groups recorded during the study were monogamous. Both male and female birds share the tasks such as incubating the eggs, repairing nest and feeding chicks. The incubation period lasted about 21 days. Our study indicates that the clutch sizes of Common Moorhens ranged between 1 and 8 per female with two to five is typical. The primer P2 and P8 sexing method was successful in identifying the sexes of 52 Common Moorhen. The male was a little bigger than the female. There was significant difference in egg length, width and weight among individual females. Only a nest¡¦s inside diameter correlated to (linear regression) the number of eggs. I think that the number of Common Moorhen populations studied in this study can be quite high, which may be due to :(1) they seem to be breed all year long with good parental care and a successful breeding system (2) some individuals may have well concealed nesting areas, and (3) they have few predators in Taiwan, (4) high survival rate of chicks.

Data classification is one of important techniques in data mining. This technique has been applied widely in many applications, e.g., disease diagnosis. Recently, the data classification technique has been be used for microarray datasets, where a microarray is a very good tool to study the gene expression levels in Bioinformatics. In the part of data classification problem for microarray datasets, we consider two biology datasets which reflect two extreme different classes for the given same sets of tests. Basically, the classification process contains two phases: (1) the training phase, and (2) the testing phase. The propose of the training phase is to find the representative Emerging Patterns (EPs) in each of these two datasets, where an EP is an itemset which satisfies some conditions of the growth rate from one dataset to another dataset. Note that the growth rate represents the differences between these two datasets. After the training phase, we take the collections of EPs in each dataset as a classifier. A test sample in the testing phase will be predicted to one of the two datasets based on the result of a similarity function, which takes the growth rate and the support into consideration. The evaluating criteria of a classifier is the accuracy. Obviously, the higher the accuracy of a classifier is, the better the performance is. Therefore, several EP-based classifiers, e.g., the EJEP and the NEP strategies, have been proposed to achieve this goal. The EJEP strategy considers only those itemsets whose growth rates are infinite, since it claims that the high growth rates may result in the high accuracy. However, the EJEP strategy will not keep those useful EPs whose growth rates are very high but not infinite. On the other hand, the real-world data always contains noises. The NEP strategy considers noises and provides the higher accuracy than the EJEP strategy. However, it still may miss some itemsets with high growth rates, which may result in the low accuracy. Therefore, in this thesis, we propose a High Growth-rate EP (HGEP) strategy to improve the disadvantages of the NEP and the EJEP strategies. In addition to considering itemsets whose growth rates are infinite in the EJEP strategy and noise patterns in the NEP strategy, our HGEP strategy considers those itemsets which have the growth rate higher than all its proper subsets when the growth rates are finite. In this way, the itemsets with high growth rates could result in high similarity, and the high similarity predicts the sets of tests into the correct class. Therefore, our HGEP can provide high accuracy. In our performance study, we use several real datasets to evaluate the average accuracy of them. Moreover, we also do simulation study of increasing noises. From the experiment results, we show that the average accuracy of our HGEP strategy is higher than that of the NEP strategy.

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<p>With the increased use of computers in every-day live, the demand for newer and better software is increasing day by day. This advancement has resulted in that many developers are searching for ways to decrease their development time. One approach is to use design patterns when designing applications. Design pattern are acknowledged solutions to known design problems that can be reused over and over again without ever doing the same thing twice. The most recent advancement of identifying design patterns has been within the domain of concurrent systems.</p><p>Design pattern within concurrent systems are of interest in this project because of its young age. Development of concurrent applications has often been compared to constant reinvention of the wheel, because code reuse is very low and solutions to design problems are being rediscovered over and over again. By using design pattern, an attempt is made to avoid that. The question is if design patterns are capable of standing under that load.</p><p>This project takes as a case study the problem of protecting a shared resource in a concurrent application, and implements two different solutions to that problem using a special design pattern. These two implementations are then evaluated, with consideration to certain software quality attributes, in a qualitative way.</p><p>This project shows how a pattern can be used to solve a common synchronization problem. It discusses the nature of design patterns, what needs to be considered when they are implemented and how a pattern language can affect the implementation.</p>

<p>Classification of protein sequence is one of the foundations of bioinformatics, as new proteins are sequenced every day. Each protein sequence represents a protein of a certain family and its function can sometimes be predicted through sequence classification. Today several approaches exist for sequence classification, and in this work pattern approaches are considered. A pattern is an expression, representing a certain protein family, which corresponding protein sequences hopefully match. PROSITE is a pattern collection that well known in the area of bioinformatics and therefore plays an important part in this project together with the MAMA pattern collection. Evaluation of patterns today focus on accuracy, i.e. sensitivity and specificity, but in this thesis information content is also considered. The intended experiment which was about discovering any relationship between accuracy and information content showed that no clear connection was found. This fact led to the conclusion that information content might not be suitable as an evaluation measure when evaluating patterns. The second experiment concerned the fact that sometimes the same sequences are used both during training and testing, which probably gives misleadingly high accuracy values. This fact gave birth to the idea that an independent test set other than the training set reduces accuracy values, which was revealed after a number of tests. Finally the last experiment, which was about creating a new system for evaluating whole pattern collections, is presented with results showing that MAMA performs better than PROSITE according to this system.</p>

<p>Background: Through the last decades vast amount of sequence information have been produced by various protein sequencing projects, which enables studies of sequential patterns. One of the bestknown efforts to chart short peptide sequences is the Prosite pattern data bank. While sequential patterns like those of Prosite have proved very useful for classifying protein families, functions etc. structural analysis may provide more information and possible crucial clues linked to protein folding. Today PDB, which is the main repository for protein structure, contains more than 50’000 entries which enables structural protein studies.</p><p>Result: Strongly folded pentapeptides, defined as pentapeptides which retained a specific conformation in several significantly structurally different proteins, were studied out of PDB. Among these several groups were found. Possibly the most well defined is the “double Cys” pentapeptide group, with two amino acids in between (CXXCX|XCXXC) which were found to form backbone loops where the two Cysteine amino acids formed a possible Cys-Cys bridge. Other structural motifs were found both in helixes and in sheets like "ECSAM" and "TIKIW", respectively.</p><p>Conclusion: There is much information to be extracted by structural analysis of pentapeptides and other oligopeptides. There is no doubt that some pentapeptides are more likely to obtain a specific fold than others and that there are many strongly folded pentapeptides. By combining the usage of such patterns in a protein folding model, such as the Hydrophobic-polar-model improvements in speed and accuracy can be obtained. Comparing structural conformations for important overrepresented pentapeptides can also help identify and refine both structural information data banks such as SCOP and sequential pattern data banks such as Prosite.</p>

Reproduction de : Thèse de doctorat : Microélectronique : Toulouse, INPT : 2005. / Titre provenant de l'écran-titre. Bibliogr. 126 réf.