The last decade has witnessed an explosion of research on persistent memory, which combines the low access latency of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) with the durability of secondary storage. Intel’s implementation of persistent memory, called Optane, comes close to realizing the game-changing potential of persistent memory in terms of performance; however, it also suffers from limited endurance and relies on a proprietary wear leveling mechanism to mitigate memory cell wear-out. The traditional embedded approach to wear leveling, in which the storage device itself maps logical addresses to physical addresses, can be fast and energy-efficient, but it is also relatively inflexible and can lead to missed opportunities for optimization. An alternative school of thought, exemplified by "open channel" solid state drives (SSDs), delegates responsibility for wear leveling to software, where it can be tailored to specific applications. In this research, we consider a hypothetical hardware platform where the same paradigm is applied to the persistent memory device, and ask how the wear leveling mechanism can be co-designed with synchronization structures that generate highly skewed memory access patterns. Building on the recent work of Liu and Golab, we implement an improved wear leveling atomic counter by leveraging hardware transactional memory in a novel way. Our solution is close to optimal with respect to both space complexity and measured performance.

End-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU) recently attracted increasing interest. Compared to the conventional tandem-based approach that combines speech recognition and language understanding as separate modules, the new approach extracts users' intentions directly from the speech signals, resulting in joint optimization and low latency. Such an approach, however, is typically designed to process one intent at a time, which leads users to have to take multiple rounds to fulfill their requirements while interacting with a dialogue system. In this paper, we propose a streaming end-to-end framework that can process multiple intentions in an online and incremental way. The backbone of our framework is a unidirectional RNN trained with the connectionist temporal classification (CTC) criterion. By this design, an intention can be identified when sufficient evidence has been accumulated, and multiple intentions will be identified sequentially. We evaluate our solution on the Fluent Speech Commands (FSC) dataset and the detection accuracy is about 97 % on all multi-intent settings. This result is comparable to the performance of the state-of-the-art non-streaming models, but is achieved in an online and incremental way. We also employ our model to an keyword spotting task using the Google Speech Commands dataset, and the results are also highly promising.

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is significantly impacted by delayed responses from a spoken dialogue system.Hence, endto-end (e2e) spoken language understanding (SLU) solutions have recently been proposed to decrease latency.Such approaches allow for the extraction of semantic information directly from the speech signal, thus bypassing the need for a transcript from an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system.In this paper, we propose a compact e2e SLU architecture for streaming scenarios, where chunks of the speech signal are processed continuously to predict intent and slot values.Our model is based on a 3D convolutional neural network (3D-CNN) and a unidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM).We compare the performance of two alignment-free losses: the connectionist temporal classification (CTC) method and its adapted version, namely connectionist temporal localization (CTL).The latter performs not only the classification but also localization of sequential audio events.The proposed solution is evaluated on the Fluent Speech Command dataset and results show our model ability to process incoming speech signal, reaching accuracy as high as 98.97 % for CTC and 98.78 % for CTL on single-label classification, and as high as 95.69 % for CTC and 95.28 % for CTL on two-label prediction.