Jan Lennart Bönsel, Michael Maurer, Silvio Petriconi
et al.
Coin selection refers to the problem of choosing a set of tokens to fund a transaction in token-based payment systems such as, e.g., cryptocurrencies or central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). In this paper, we propose the Boltzmann Draw that is a probabilistic algorithm inspired by the principles of statistical physics. The algorithm relies on drawing tokens according to the Boltzmann distribution, serving as an extension and improvement of the Random Draw method. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in bounding the number of selected input tokens as well as reducing dust generation and limiting the token pool size in the wallet. Moreover, the probabilistic algorithm can be implemented efficiently, improves performance and respects privacy requirements - properties of significant relevance for current token-based technologies. We compare the Boltzmann draw to both the standard Random Draw and the Greedy algorithm. We argue that the former is superior to the latter in the sense of the above objectives. Our findings are relevant for token-based technologies, and are also of interest for CBDCs, which as a legal tender possibly needs to handle large transaction volumes at a high frequency.
Paula Carolina Lozano Duarte, Sule Ozev, Mehdi Tahoori
Thin-film technologies such as Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide (IGZO) enable Flexible Electronics (FE) for emerging applications in wearable sensing, personal health monitoring, and large-area systems. Analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) serve as critical sensor interfaces in these systems. Yet, their vulnerability to manufacturing defects remains poorly understood despite unipolar technologies' inherently high defect densities and process variations compared to mature CMOS technologies. We present a hierarchical fault injection framework to characterize defect sensitivity in Binary Search ADCs implemented in n-type only technologies. Our methodology combines transistor-level defect characterization with system-level fault propagation analysis, enabling efficient exploration of both single and multiple fault scenarios across the conversion hierarchy. The framework identifies critical fault-sensitive circuit components and enables selective redundancy strategies targeting only the most sensitive components. The resulting defect-tolerant designs improve fault coverage from 60% to 92% under single-fault injections and from 34% to 77.6% under multi-fault injection, while incurring only 4.2% area overhead and 6% power increase. While validated on IGZO-TFTs, the methodology applies to all emerging unipolar technologies.
This paper considers the task of connecting points on a piece of paper by drawing a curve between each pair of them. Under mild assumptions, we prove that many pairwise disjoint curves are unavoidable if either of the following rules is obeyed: any two adjacent curves do not cross, or any two non-adjacent curves cross at most once. Here, two curves are called adjacent if they share an endpoint. On the other hand, we demonstrate how to draw all curves such that any two adjacent curves cross exactly once, any two non-adjacent curves cross at least once and at most twice, and thus no two curves are disjoint. Furthermore, we analyze the emergence of disjoint curves without these mild assumptions, and characterize the plane structures in complete graph drawings guaranteed by each of the rules above.
This study compared the legibility of the Thai Universal Design typeface (FT Manifest UD) with that of two Roman-like Thai typefaces (DB Ozone and Sukhumvit Tadmai) across multiple viewing distances. Using a distance threshold methodology, thirty-one Thai participants of diverse ages and visual acuities identified 36 Thai consonants at 15 distinct viewing distances. Statistical analysis using the Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test revealed that FT Manifest UD significantly outperformed other typefaces in overall legibility (p < 0.05), with 24 of 36 letterforms showing superior legibility.
With the widespread adoption of Computer-Aided Design(CAD) drawings in engineering, architecture, and industrial design, the ability to accurately interpret and analyze these drawings has become increasingly critical. Among various subtasks, panoptic symbol spotting plays a vital role in enabling downstream applications such as CAD automation and design retrieval. Existing methods primarily focus on geometric primitives within the CAD drawings to address this task, but they face following major problems: they usually overlook the rich textual annotations present in CAD drawings and they lack explicit modeling of relationships among primitives, resulting in incomprehensive understanding of the holistic drawings. To fill this gap, we propose a panoptic symbol spotting framework that incorporates textual annotations. The framework constructs unified representations by jointly modeling geometric and textual primitives. Then, using visual features extract by pretrained CNN as the initial representations, a Transformer-based backbone is employed, enhanced with a type-aware attention mechanism to explicitly model the different types of spatial dependencies between various primitives. Extensive experiments on the real-world dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing approaches on symbol spotting tasks involving textual annotations, and exhibits superior robustness when applied to complex CAD drawings.
Processing-in-memory (PIM) is a transformative architectural paradigm designed to overcome the Von Neumann bottleneck. Among PIM architectures, digital SRAM-PIM emerges as a promising solution, offering significant advantages by directly integrating digital logic within the SRAM array. However, rigid crossbar architecture and full array activation pose challenges in efficiently utilizing traditional value-level sparsity. Moreover, neural network models exhibit a high proportion of zero bits within non-zero values, which remain underutilized due to architectural constraints. To overcome these limitations, we present Dyadic Block PIM (DB-PIM), a groundbreaking algorithm-architecture co-design framework to harness both value-level and bit-level sparsity. At the algorithm level, our hybrid-grained pruning technique, combined with a novel sparsity pattern, enables effective sparsity management. Architecturally, DB-PIM incorporates a sparse network and customized digital SRAM-PIM macros, including input pre-processing unit (IPU), dyadic block multiply units (DBMUs), and Canonical Signed Digit (CSD)-based adder trees. It circumvents structured zero values in weights and bypasses unstructured zero bits within non-zero weights and block-wise all-zero bit columns in input features. As a result, the DB-PIM framework skips a majority of unnecessary computations, thereby driving significant gains in computational efficiency. Results demonstrate that our DB-PIM framework achieves up to 8.01x speedup and 85.28% energy savings, significantly boosting computational efficiency in digital SRAM-PIM systems.
In recent years, with the improvement of China's comprehensive national strength and the enhancement of cultural confidence, the application of Chinese traditional elements in modern design is increasingly extensive. As an important symbol in the traditional culture, its unique artistic characteristics and visual expression can provide a rich source of inspiration for modern design. Based on the historical background and cultural significance of traditional Bagua, this paper summarizes the cultural connotation and artistic characteristics and discusses the innovative application of Bagua grain in modern illustration design. The research focuses on the three aspects of color, content and composition, and analyzes the integration of gossip pattern and illustration design. Through this study, it aims to provide new ideas for the integration of traditional culture and modern design, and promote the innovative expression and cultural inheritance of Bagua grain in contemporary visual art.
The fast pace at which new online services emerge leads to a rapid surge in the volume of network traffic. A recent approach that the research community has proposed to tackle this issue is in-network computing, which means that network devices perform more computations than before. As a result, processing demands become more varied, creating the need for flexible packet-processing architectures. State-of-the-art approaches provide a high degree of flexibility at the expense of performance for complex applications, or they ensure high performance but only for specific use cases. In order to address these limitations, we propose FlexCross. This flexible packet-processing design can process network traffic with diverse processing requirements at over 100 Gbit/s on FPGAs. Our design contains a crosspoint-queued crossbar that enables the execution of complex applications by forwarding incoming packets to the required processing engines in the specified sequence. The crossbar consists of distributed logic blocks that route incoming packets to the specified targets and resolve contentions for shared resources, as well as memory blocks for packet buffering. We implemented a prototype of FlexCross in Verilog and evaluated it via cycle-accurate register-transfer level simulations. We also conducted test runs with real-world network traffic on an FPGA. The evaluation results demonstrate that FlexCross outperforms state-of-the-art flexible packet-processing designs for different traffic loads and scenarios. The synthesis results show that our prototype consumes roughly 21% of the resources on a Virtex XCU55 UltraScale+ FPGA.
Victor Boutin, Rishav Mukherji, Aditya Agrawal
et al.
Humans can effortlessly draw new categories from a single exemplar, a feat that has long posed a challenge for generative models. However, this gap has started to close with recent advances in diffusion models. This one-shot drawing task requires powerful inductive biases that have not been systematically investigated. Here, we study how different inductive biases shape the latent space of Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs). Along with standard LDM regularizers (KL and vector quantization), we explore supervised regularizations (including classification and prototype-based representation) and contrastive inductive biases (using SimCLR and redundancy reduction objectives). We demonstrate that LDMs with redundancy reduction and prototype-based regularizations produce near-human-like drawings (regarding both samples' recognizability and originality) -- better mimicking human perception (as evaluated psychophysically). Overall, our results suggest that the gap between humans and machines in one-shot drawings is almost closed.
Diffusion-based text-to-image personalization have achieved great success in generating subjects specified by users among various contexts. Even though, existing finetuning-based methods still suffer from model overfitting, which greatly harms the generative diversity, especially when given subject images are few. To this end, we propose Pick-and-Draw, a training-free semantic guidance approach to boost identity consistency and generative diversity for personalization methods. Our approach consists of two components: appearance picking guidance and layout drawing guidance. As for the former, we construct an appearance palette with visual features from the reference image, where we pick local patterns for generating the specified subject with consistent identity. As for layout drawing, we outline the subject's contour by referring to a generative template from the vanilla diffusion model, and inherit the strong image prior to synthesize diverse contexts according to different text conditions. The proposed approach can be applied to any personalized diffusion models and requires as few as a single reference image. Qualitative and quantitative experiments show that Pick-and-Draw consistently improves identity consistency and generative diversity, pushing the trade-off between subject fidelity and image-text fidelity to a new Pareto frontier.
Stress models are a promising approach for graph drawing. They minimize the weighted sum of the squared errors of the Euclidean and desired distances for each node pair. The desired distance typically uses the graph-theoretic distances obtained from the all-node pair shortest path problem. In a minimized stress function, the obtained coordinates are affected by the non-Euclidean property and the high-dimensionality of the graph-theoretic distance matrix. Therefore, the graph-theoretic distances used in stress models may not necessarily be the best metric for determining the node coordinates. In this study, we propose two different methods of adjusting the graph-theoretical distance matrix to a distance matrix suitable for graph drawing while preserving its structure. The first method is the application of eigenvalue decomposition to the inner product matrix obtained from the distance matrix and the obtainment of a new distance matrix by setting some eigenvalues with small absolute values to zero. The second approach is the usage of a stress model modified by adding a term that minimizes the Frobenius norm between the adjusted and original distance matrices. We perform computational experiments using several benchmark graphs to demonstrate that the proposed method improves some quality metrics, including the node resolution and the Gabriel graph property, when compared to conventional stress models.
With the rapid development of the commercial economy, public aesthetic standards have continuously improved, leading to the widespread appreciation and extensive application of vector illustration. This study examines the forms and values of vector illustration in the context of beverage brand design, using the visual upgrade of the "Si Hao" lemon tea brand as a case study. By integrating emotional design theory, the study explores its feasibility in commercial brand visual upgrades, focusing on aspects such as emotional expression, design principles, application strategies, and implementation processes. The findings aim to provide theoretical insights and practical references for future designers.
La educación superior puede tener un papel real en cómo se entiende socialmente la creatividad y la profesión creativa. El estudio se centra en los imaginarios y expectativas del estudiantado universitario de comunicación y diseño en torno a la profesión creativa. Es un estudio de caso exploratorio cualitativo basado en un cuestionario respondido por 273 estudiantes de Grado en Comunicación y Grado en Diseño. A través de un análisis temático de datos, abordamos las creencias del estudiantado sobre lo que es la creatividad, sus expectativas sobre el trabajo creativo y sus inquietudes sobre las condiciones laborales en las industrias creativas.
El rol de los Derechos Humanos (DH) ha comenzado a explorarse en la disciplina del diseño sin profundizar en la perspectiva de las y los diseñadores profesionales. Ante este vacío, el objetivo de la investigación fue indagar la experiencia de un grupo de personas diseñadoras a partir de sus conocimientos, habilidades prácticas, formación e interés en diseñar con perspectiva de DH. Para cumplir el objetivo se estableció llevar a cabo una investigación exploratoria y se diseñó un cuestionario con 15 reactivos para indagar los puntos antes mencionados. El instrumento se aplicó vía formularios de Google a 55 diseñadoras y diseñadores. Los datos obtenidos fueron tratados mediante dos tipos de análisis, el primero estadístico descriptivo y el segundo cualitativo a partir del análisis de contenido con el apoyo del software MAXQDA. Los resultados muestran que las personas participantes: a) consideraron novedosa la idea de diseñar bajo un enfoque de DH, b) reportaron estar dispuestas a explorarlo por la relevancia que tienen los DH y cómo estos pueden insertarse en la práctica de diseño y c) reconocieron no tener los conocimientos ni haber recibido formación suficiente sobre el tema. Se concluye que es importante generar propuestas para implementar los DH en la práctica de diseño, lo que también impactará en la formación de las personas diseñadoras.
The textile and clothing industry intensifies pollution through the production of fast fashion clothes. The increase fast-fashion clothes imports in South Africa has led to the closing of textile factories and consequently resulted in a loss of jobs. Sustainable development is the solution to reducing socio-environmental harm. Sustainable processes and products reportedly create new employment. Fashion design entrepreneurs are often involved and have influence in every supply chain of their business and are thus in one of the best positions to implement sustainable fashion supply chain operations. The aim of this qualitative study was to investigate South African fashion design entrepreneurs’ awareness and practices of sustainable fashion supply chain operations. Participants were selected purposively, and data was collected through semi-structured interviews. The results indicated that majority of the primary participants were aware of sustainable fabrics through personal research. Half of them source and produce sustainable garments on a small scale due to the high price of sustainable fabrics. All of the participants had limited knowledge on sustainable design methods. All the participants save their fabric off-cuts and only half of them is motivated by environmental concern. Furthermore, the results indicated that there is a lack of systems to manage the recycling of fabric cut-off and lack of business management skills. Given that there are few sustainable fashion design entrepreneurs in South Africa, the study recommends the textile and clothing industry leaders especially sustainability practitioners to disseminate knowledge and training across the board on sustainable supply chain operations.
Social sciences (General), Drawing. Design. Illustration
Hva kan en nymaterialistisk lesning av barnelitteratur tilby? Nymaterialisme innebærer et klimaperspektiv som vektlegger menneskelig tilhørighet i naturen, som kan hjelpe i møte med det Latour (2014) skildrer som en følelse av hjelpeløshet, som skriver seg fra menneskets særegne plass i den antropocene klimavirkeligheten. Nymaterialistisk teori, særlig Lynch & Mannions (2021) konsepter «attunement» og «place-responsivity», lanseres som et plausibelt alternativ for å gjøre økokritiske lesninger. En slik inngang innebærer en utfordring av grunnleggende antakelser om relasjonen mellom menneske og natur, og brukes i en lesning av Maria Parrs barneroman Tonje Glimmerdal (2009). Lesningen kretser rundt de ulike karakterenes forbindelse til Glimmerdalen som et litterært landskap som former og formes av karakterene som befolker det. Tonje selv er en prototypisk representasjon av nymaterialismens konsept om «entanglement», en type landskapstilhørighet, hvor landskap og aktører vokser frem sammen i en «sammenfiltret» tilstand, som gjør det vanskelig å skille natur fra kultur. Tonjes programmatiske syn på både lokale og globale klimautfordringer gjør henne til et naturlig anker for forbindelsen mellom antropocene overtramp lokalt og globalt. I et utviklingsperspektiv er det likevel karakteren Heidis gradvise og til dels ufrivillige «attunement»-prosess som er mest illustrerende for den konkrete effekten sted-responsivitet har på aktørene, hvor det forårsaker en re-«attunement», som i sin tur fører Heidi til å anlegge Tonjes perspektiv, og bryte med Klaus Hagens utenforstående, teknokratiske pastoralsyn.
Drawing. Design. Illustration, Literature (General)
Мета статті – окреслити архітектурні традиції та проблеми збереження художнього образу історичної забудови міст Прикарпаття. В статті розглянуто політичний чинник розвитку міського архітектурного середовища Івано-Франківщини. Осмислено процес і специфіку трансформації архітектурного середовища, здійснено його систематизацію за періодами і стилістичними ознаками. Методи дослідження. Методика дослідження ґрунтується на порівняльному аналізі різних періодів, а також на натурних обстеженнях й фіксаціях, які проводяться на двох рівнях: загально-оглядовому і поглибленому аналізі за групами об’єктів-представників, що стає базовим матеріалом для структурного аналізу. Наукова новизна дослідження полягає у виявленні політичного чинника розвитку міського архітектурного середовища Івано-Франківщини. Висновки. Політичний чинник позначився на всіх етапах розвитку і під час заснування міст Івано-Франківщини. Зі зміною влади змінювались стильові концепції, які виявлялись в опорядженні фасадів, їх декорі. Художні особливості оновлення архітектурного середовища значною мірою залежали від керівних настанов правлячої верхівки. Відповідно до цього, архітектурне середовище міст Івано-Франківщини розвивалося під культурно-мистецькими впливами Польщі (Речі Посполитої), Австро-Угорської імперії, Радянського Союзу. За останні десятиліття знижувався вплив політичного чинника внаслідок глобалізаційних процесів, відкритості, загальнодоступності та внаслідок пожвавлення особистої свободи користувачів, їхніх смаків і світогляду. Впродовж року внаслідок військового вторгнення Росії в Україну з новою силою посилюється політичний чинник розвитку міст, оскільки постають питання відбудови окремих фрагментів відносин викликає зміну уявлень, які пов’язані з архітектурними формами.
La Cartilla escolar antifascista diseñada por Mauricio Amster (1907-1980) en 1937 se ha convertido en un valioso testimonio del proyecto educativo republicano emprendido durante la Guerra Civil española. El objetivo de este texto es revisar algunas interacciones entre diferentes imágenes y técnicas relacionadas con la cartilla de alfabetización, prestando atención a la performatividad de las imágenes y su potencial.
У статті розглянуто та проаналізовано одну з наймасштабніших та найбільших українських інтерактивних виставок. Наведено приклади вже існуючих експонатів та інсталяцій. В ході роботи над статтею було виявлено, що на даний момент існують компанії спеціалізовані на випуску інтерактивних технічних елементів для багатолюдних заходів, на кшталт виставок, ярмарок, а також для різноманітних магазинів та музеїв. Надано визначення самому поняттю інтерактивності як такому, та його особливостям з боку виставок. Мета. Метою даного дослідження є аналіз перспектив розвитку інтерактивних виставок в Україні, а також визначення найпопулярніших напрямків для цих виставок. Аналіз можливостей сучасного оснащення. Методологія. У даній статті було використано наукометричний метод (аналіз вітчизняного та закордонного досвіду проведення облаштування та проведення інтерактивних виставок). Результати. Досліджено саме поняття інтерактивності у виставках, а також перспективи розвитку даного виду виставок в Україні на основі вже існуючих вітчизняних та іноземних аналогів. Надано визначення інтерактивності. Проаналізовано та детально розібрано найбільш успішну інтерактивну за історію Незалежної України виставку. Наукова новизна. Досліджено перспективи розвитку інтерактивних виставок в Україні. Оскільки інтерактивність у виставках, це відносно нове поняття, принаймні для Українських проєктів, дане дослідження є досить актуальним на сьогодні. Практична значущість. Досліджено перспективи розвитку інтерактивних виставок в Україні. Представлено приклади сучасного оснащення, що є необхідним для проведення масових заходів, таких як ярмарки, виставки, музеї та інше.