As the feature size of CMOS technology rapidly shrinks into the very deep submicrometer, the power density is getting higher and the circuit's reliability is seriously impacted by thermal noise. In order to reduce power dissipation, decreasing the supply voltage is a promising way. However, soft errors and decreased supply voltage make circuits behave probabilistic. Fortunately, some applications can tolerate a certain level of operation errors. The tradeoff between energy and reliability provides an opportunity to save the power consumption in the circuit. An asymptotically linear analysis (ALA) strategy is proposed to model the reliability evaluation of combinational logic circuits. Under the assumption that the gate error probability is not more than 0.05, an asymptotic linear matrix A is constructed by using the first-order term of the output error probability. When propagating the gate error probability from the input to the output ports, the ALA strategy only requires one multiplication between the matrix A and the gate error probability vector. There are significant differences in the complexity of computation of the ALA scheme and the Bayesian network (BN) and the probability transfer matrix (PTM) schemes, while its relative error (RE) is no more than 0.08 on the benchmark of LGSynth91. Furthermore, three schemes are proposed to adjust the gate error probability to meet the constraint on the error probability of the probabilistic CMOS (PCMOS) circuit's outputs. The proposed schemes can be performed to search the gate error probability combinations in the logic and circuit design stage of VLSI. During the power optimization, the switching activity factor in the asymptotically linear region is approximately invariant. It makes the power optimal model convex. The energy-saving ratio of the proposed power optimization scheme is 5%-6% higher than the existing schemes. The time consumption of the proposed three schemes is one-thousandth of the time consumed by the BN and PTM schemes. All the three schemes are verified by conducting experiments on the ISCAS'85 and IWLS'15 benchmark circuits. The simulation results establish the feasibility of the ALA and the performance of the proposed schemes.

Work zones exist widely in cities of many countries and have a significant negative impact on city traffic. The majority of the existing studies only focused on freeway work zones, while the work zones on urban arterials have not been investigated carefully. For the first time, this paper focuses on a specific type of work zone that is located within the area of the intersection, namely, the island work zone, and proposes a novel model for the traffic flow of the island work zone based on the social force theory. Compared to the existing traffic-flow models, such as the car-following and lane-changing models, the proposed model can capture the special characteristics of the traffic flow in the island work zone, such as heterogeneity, no lane division, and irregular boundary. The field data collected in Chengdu, China, are used to calibrate and validate the proposed model. Simulations are also conducted to investigate the variations of traffic-flow characteristics for different work zone features. The results display that the model can replicate the heterogeneous traffic flow of the intersection with island work zone with high performance. When an island work zone is located close to the intersection approach, it will significantly block the entrance of vehicles. When the work zone occupies over 1 m of the median divider, its impact on the traffic flow will become very significant.

Driver assistance system is currently an active research and development field for the general goal to provide useful information to drivers in order to reduce the number of injuries and fatalities in traffic. One important component of future systems will be an accurate and reliable positioning, which can be realized by relative measurement, using onboard sensors and maps of the environment. This paper explores the use of dense laser scan data from airborne LiDAR scanning systems for the production of such 3D navigation maps, extracting features from airborne LiDAR data and onboard image data, so as to simultaneous matching and positioning based on overlapping the LiDAR data and onboard images. In order to get the accuracy position, we propose vPOSRIT (vehicle Pose from Orthography and Scaling with Registrations and ITerations) algorithm to determine pose in the establishing correspondence which register 3D architecture features from building models and the real-time images obtained from onboard camera automatically.

BACKGROUND: In the post-genomic era, the rapid increase in high-throughput data calls for computational tools capable of integrating data of diverse types and facilitating recognition of biologically meaningful patterns within them. For example, protein-protein interaction data sets have been clustered to identify stable complexes, but scientists lack easily accessible tools to facilitate combined analyses of multiple data sets from different types of experiments. Here we present clusterMaker, a Cytoscape plugin that implements several clustering algorithms and provides network, dendrogram, and heat map views of the results. The Cytoscape network is linked to all of the other views, so that a selection in one is immediately reflected in the others. clusterMaker is the first Cytoscape plugin to implement such a wide variety of clustering algorithms and visualizations, including the only implementations of hierarchical clustering, dendrogram plus heat map visualization (tree view), k-means, k-medoid, SCPS, AutoSOME, and native (Java) MCL. RESULTS: Results are presented in the form of three scenarios of use: analysis of protein expression data using a recently published mouse interactome and a mouse microarray data set of nearly one hundred diverse cell/tissue types; the identification of protein complexes in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae; and the cluster analysis of the vicinal oxygen chelate (VOC) enzyme superfamily. For scenario one, we explore functionally enriched mouse interactomes specific to particular cellular phenotypes and apply fuzzy clustering. For scenario two, we explore the prefoldin complex in detail using both physical and genetic interaction clusters. For scenario three, we explore the possible annotation of a protein as a methylmalonyl-CoA epimerase within the VOC superfamily. Cytoscape session files for all three scenarios are provided in the Additional Files section. CONCLUSIONS: The Cytoscape plugin clusterMaker provides a number of clustering algorithms and visualizations that can be used independently or in combination for analysis and visualization of biological data sets, and for confirming or generating hypotheses about biological function. Several of these visualizations and algorithms are only available to Cytoscape users through the clusterMaker plugin. clusterMaker is available via the Cytoscape plugin manager.

BACKGROUND: Metabolite profiles can be used for identifying molecular signatures and mechanisms underlying diseases since they reflect the outcome of complex upstream genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic and environmental events. The scarcity of publicly accessible large scale metabolome datasets related to human disease has been a major obstacle for assessing the potential of metabolites as biomarkers as well as understanding the molecular events underlying disease-related metabolic changes. The availability of metabolite and gene expression profiles for the NCI-60 cell lines offers the possibility of identifying significant metabolome and transcriptome features and discovering unique molecular processes related to different cancer types. METHODS: We utilized a combination of analytical methods in the R statistical package to evaluate metabolic features associated with cancer cell lines from different tissue origins, identify metabolite-gene correlations and detect outliers cell lines based on metabolome and transcriptome data. Statistical analysis results are integrated with metabolic pathway annotations as well as COSMIC and Tumorscape databases to explore associated molecular mechanisms. RESULTS: Our analysis reveals that although the NCI-60 metabolome dataset is quite noisy comparing with microarray-based transcriptome data, it does contain tissue origin specific signatures. We also identified biologically meaningful gene-metabolite associations. Most remarkably, several abnormal gene-metabolite relationships identified by our approach can be directly linked to known gene mutations and copy number variations in the corresponding cell lines. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that integrative metabolome and transcriptome analysis is a powerful method for understanding molecular machinery underlying various pathophysiological processes. We expect the availability of large scale metabolome data in the coming years will significantly promote the discovery of novel biomarkers, which will in turn improve the understanding of molecular mechanism underlying diseases.

SUMMARY: GSearcher provides a highly interactive user experience in navigating attribute data associated with large and complex biological networks. The user may either perform a quick search using keywords, phrases or regular expressions, or build a complex query with a group of filters for efficient and flexible exploration of large datasets. AVAILABILITY: http://brainarray.mbni.med.umich.edu/gsearcher/.

SUMMARY: GLay provides Cytoscape users an assorted collection of versatile community structure algorithms and graph layout functions for network clustering and structured visualization. High performance is achieved by dynamically linking highly optimized C functions to the Cytoscape JAVA program, which makes GLay especially suitable for decomposition, display and exploratory analysis of large biological networks. AVAILABILITY: http://brainarray.mbni.med.umich.edu/glay/.

We investigate the bandwidth allocation and power control schemes in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based multi-hop cognitive radio networks, and the color-sensitive graph coloring (CSGC) model is viewed as an efficient solution to the spectrum assignment problem. We extend the model by taking into account the power control strategy to avoid interference among secondary users and adapt dynamic topology. We formulate the optimization problem encompassing the channel allocation, power control with the interference constrained below a tolerable limit. The optimization objective with two different optimization strategies focuses on the routes rather than the links as in traditional approaches. A heuristic solution to this nondeterministic polynomial (NP)-hard problem is presented, which performs iterative channel allocation according to the lowest transmission power that guarantees the link connection and makes channel reuse as much as possible, and then the transmission power of each link is maximized to improve the channel capacity by gradually adding power level from the lowest transmission power until all co-channel links cannot satisfy the interference constraints. Numerical results show that our proposed strategies outperform the existing spectrum assignment algorithms in the performance of both the total network bandwidth and minimum route bandwidth of all routes, meanwhile, saving the transmission power.

A capsule robot that moves utilizing the internal force between the shell and the sliding mass and the friction between the shell and the environment is named "internal force-static friction" capsubot. The new driving mode is used in the active gastrointestinal examination robot system, which is a novel and meaningful attempt. In this paper, for the operation mechanism and movement characteristics of capsubot, a new type of electromagnetic driver has been designed. The driver is optimized and analyzed by magnetic circuit method and finite element method. Then we manufacture the prototype of the capsubot. The driver has big output power, a small size and a high weight proportion of the sliding mass and the shell, which has been proved by the experiment. The speed on the table is 45.8mm/s.