•Overview •Microarchitecture design •Agile development platform •Applications in industry & academia •Summary

Conventional copy-paste augmentations generate new training instances by concatenating existing utterances to increase the amount of data for neural network training. However, the direct application of copy-paste augmentation for anti-spoofing is problematic. This paper refines the copy-paste augmentation for speech anti-spoofing, dubbed CpAug, to generate more training data with rich intra-class diversity. The CpAug employs two policies: concatenation to merge utterances with identical labels, and substitution to replace segments in an anchor utterance. Besides, considering the impacts of speakers and spoofing attack types, we craft four blending strategies for the CpAug. Furthermore, we explore how CpAug complements the Rawboost augmentation method. Experimental results reveal that the proposed CpAug significantly improves the performance of speech anti-spoofing. Particularly, CpAug with substitution policy leads to relative improvements of 43% and 38% on the ASVspoof’ 19LA and 21LA, respectively. Notably, the CpAug and Rawboost synergize effectively, achieving an EER of 2.91% on ASVspoof’ 21LA.

While research has shown that the agile chip design methodology is promising to sustain the scaling of computing performance in a more efficient way, it is still of limited usage in actual applications due to two major obstacles: 1) Lack of tool-chain and developing framework supporting agile chip design, especially for large-scale modern processors. 2) The conventional verification methods are less agile and become a major bottleneck of the entire process. To tackle both issues, we propose MINJIE, an open-source platform supporting agile processor development flow. MINJIE integrates a broad set of tools for logic design, functional verification, performance modelling, pre-silicon validation and debugging for better development efficiency of state-of-the-art processor designs. We demonstrate the usage and effectiveness of MINJIE by building two generations of an open-source superscalar out-of-order RISC-V processor code-named XIANGSHAN using agile methodologies. We quantify the performance of XIANGSHAN using SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks and demonstrate that XIANGSHAN achieves industry-competitive performance.

Autonomous Driving Systems (ADSs) are complex systems that must satisfy multiple safety requirements. In particular cases, all the requirements cannot be satisfied at the same time, and the control software of the ADS must make trade-offs among their satisfaction. Usually, the trading-offs in the decision-making process are configurable; different configuration options can affect driving behaviors, satisfying or violating requirements at different degrees. Therefore, it is highly important to know whether a configuration can guarantee a safe drive or not, i.e., whether it leads to requirement violations that exceed the allowable range or not. However, there is currently no approach to systematically assess the safety of ADS configurations from the perspective of requirements violations. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes a “Hierarchical Safety Assessment” approach (HSA) that is able to quantitatively analyze the violation severity of safety requirements and distinguish safer ADS configurations based on the requirements violations comparison done in a hierarchical way by following requirements importance. We apply HSA to an industrial ADS under six traffic situations. Evaluation results show that HSA is effective in distinguishing safer configurations and provides useful feedback to ADS engineers to reconfigure the ADS in a better way.

Speech emotion recognition is important to understand users' intention in human-computer interaction. However, it is a challenging task partly because we cannot clearly know which feature and model are effective to distinguish emotions. Previous studies utilize convolutional neural network (CNN) directly on spectrograms to extract features, and bidirectional long short term memory (BLSTM) is the state-of-the-art model. However, there are two problems of CNN-BLSTM. Firstly, it doesn't utilize heuristic features based on priori knowledge. Secondly, BLSTM has a complex structure and high complexity in training. To address the first problem, we propose a feature fusion method that combines CNN-based features and heuristic-based discriminative features which are extracted from heuristic features using deep neural network (DNN). In addition, we utilize extreme learning machine (ELM) instead of BLSTM to solve the second problem. The experiments conducted on EmoDB and our method leads to 40% relative error reduction in Fl-score compared to CNN-BLSTM.

With the increase of vehicles in city, unexpected abnormal events may occur on roads more frequently. It is necessary to disseminate abnormal traffic information to other vehicles in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs).With traditional geocasting protocols, the considered target region is normally single and its range is fixed. However, when an abnormal event occurs, its impacted area may include multiple streets or roads and it may last for a long time. In this paper, for multiple target regions we propose a SmartGeocast information dissemination mechanism, which contains two procedures including geocasting initialization and geocasting maintenance. In the first procedure, the abnormal traffic information can be delivered to multiple regions quickly and efficiently through path sharing and path splitting schemes. Considering that new vehicles may continuously drive into the target regions, the abnormal traffic information have to be “floating or visible” to them until the event impact gradually disappears. In the second procedure, it divides a small area in each target region for information dissemination to new arrived vehicles repeatedly, so as to furthermore reduce the message redundancy and maintenance cost. Experimental results show that the proposed SmartGeocast protocol can decrease the probability of receiving the repeated messages while try to avoid missing the important information.