In healthcare facilities, answering the questions from the patients and their companions about the health problems is regarded as an essential task. With the current shortage of medical personnel resources and an increase in the patient-to-clinician ratio, staff in the medical field have consequently devoted less time to answering questions for each patient. However, studies have shown that correct healthcare information can positively improve patients' knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. Therefore, delivering correct healthcare knowledge through a question-answering system is crucial. In this article, we develop an interactive healthcare question-answering system that uses attention-based models to answer healthcare-related questions. Attention-based transformer models are utilized to efficiently encode semantic meanings and extract the medical entities inside the user query individually. These two features are integrated through our designed fusion module to match against the pre-collected healthcare knowledge set, so that our system will finally give the most accurate response to the user in real-time. To improve the interactivity, we further introduce a recommendation module and an online web search module to provide potential questions and out-of-scope answers. Experimental results for question-answer retrieval show that the proposed method has the ability to retrieve the correct answer from the FAQ pairs in the healthcare domain. Thus, we believe that this application can bring more benefits to human beings.

A robust redistribution layer (RDL) router is required for advanced package designs, where the length-matching constraint for a group of nets needs to be considered to preserve good timing properties at the package level. For area-I/O flip-chip design with pre-assigned nets on RDLs, we propose the first group-based length-matching routing framework that can simultaneously minimize the wirelengths of an arbitrary group of nets with and without equal-length constraints, based on an equal-length-aware A*-search algorithm and a bounded sliceline grid (BSG) snaking one. For the irregular structure of the area-I/O flip-chip design, we apply Delaunay triangulation and Voronoi diagram to model the routing resources more precisely. To effectively consider the equal-length constraints in the earlier stage, we first profile the routing resource to obtain an approximation of the longest net, and then adopt the equal-length-aware A*-search algorithm to extend shorter nets to match the estimated longest net. A BSG-based snaking method is then applied to meet the equal-length constraint, while preserving the minimized wirelength of unconstrained nets. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework can solve all benchmarks effectively and efficiently.

The emerging design requirements with the FinFET technology, along with traditional geometrical constraints, make the FinFET-based analog placement even more challenging. Previous works can handle only partial FinFET-induced design constraints because some new constraints are intrinsically different from the traditional ones; as a result, directly extending previous methods to handle FinFET-induced constraints would incur solution quality degradation and runtime overhead. To remedy these disadvantages, we present a new hybrid graph (meshed tree) representation of a window mesh and CB-trees (namely, WB-trees) and a new placement flow with effective and efficient schemes to simultaneously handle FinFET-based design constraints and traditional ones. Experimental results based on industrial designs with various constraints show that our placer outperforms published works in both solution quality and runtime.

In this paper, we propose an operational model to support the security of Web services. In addition to satisfying the basic security requirements, including authentication, confidentiality, data integrity, and nonrepudiation, the proposed model supports security mechanisms such as element-wise encryption and temporal-based element-wise digital signatures. Furthermore, the proposed model supports a flexible key specification scheme called explicit key definition, which can be used to define three different types of keys: static keys, dynamically selected keys, and keys applied to digital signatures. The service requester can determine the identity of the keys used without negotiating with the service provider. The implementation and experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system.

With the rapid advances in mobile communication technologies, QR code in the embedded camera devices has been used as new input interfaces. However, the previous works for extracting QR code from an image do not consider a non-uniform background. In this paper, we implement the applications of QR code and propose an efficient algorithm to extract QR code from the non-uniform background. In contrast with prior works, our approach is of higher accuracy for QR-code recognition and more practical for use in a mobile information environment.