Abstract-With the success of formal verification techniques like equivalence checking and model checking for hardware designs, there has been growing interest in applying such techniques for formal analysis and automatic verification of software programs. This paper provides a brief tutorial on model checking of C programs. The essential approach is to model the semantics of C programs in the form of finite state systems by using suitable abstractions. The use of abstractions is key, both for modeling programs as finite state systems and for reducing the model sizes in order to manage verification complexity. We provide illustrative details of a verification platform called F-SOFT, which provides a range of abstractions for modeling software, and uses customized SAT-based and BDD-based model checking techniques targeted for software.

Objective: To explore the spatial-temporal interaction effect within a Bayesian framework and to probe the ecological influential factors for tuberculosis. Methods: Six different statistical models containing parameters of time, space, spatial-temporal interaction and their combination were constructed based on a Bayesian framework. The optimum model was selected according to the deviance information criterion (DIC) value. Coefficients of climate variables were then estimated using the best fitting model. Results: The model containing spatial-temporal interaction parameter was the best fitting one, with the smallest DIC value (−4,508,660). Ecological analysis results showed the relative risks (RRs) of average temperature, rainfall, wind speed, humidity, and air pressure were 1.00324 (95% CI, 1.00150–1.00550), 1.01010 (95% CI, 1.01007–1.01013), 0.83518 (95% CI, 0.93732–0.96138), 0.97496 (95% CI, 0.97181–1.01386), and 1.01007 (95% CI, 1.01003–1.01011), respectively. Conclusions: The spatial-temporal interaction was statistically meaningful and the prevalence of tuberculosis was influenced by the time and space interaction effect. Average temperature, rainfall, wind speed, and air pressure influenced tuberculosis. Average humidity had no influence on tuberculosis.

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While back-translation is simple and effective in exploiting abundant monolingual corpora to improve low-resource neural machine translation (NMT), the synthetic bilingual corpora generated by NMT models trained on limited authentic bilingual data are inevitably noisy. In this work, we propose to quantify the confidence of NMT model predictions based on model uncertainty. With word-and sentence-level confidence measures based on uncertainty, it is possible for back-translation to better cope with noise in synthetic bilingual corpora. Experiments on Chinese-English and English-German translation tasks show that uncertainty-based confidence estimation significantly improves the performance of backtranslation. 1

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(1) Background: Evidence regarding scarlet fever and its relationship with meteorological, including air pollution factors, is not very available. This study aimed to examine the relationship between ambient air pollutants and meteorological factors with scarlet fever occurrence in Beijing, China. (2) Methods: A retrospective ecological study was carried out to distinguish the epidemic characteristics of scarlet fever incidence in Beijing districts from 2013 to 2014. Daily incidence and corresponding air pollutant and meteorological data were used to develop the model. Global Moran’s I statistic and Anselin’s local Moran’s I (LISA) were applied to detect the spatial autocorrelation (spatial dependency) and clusters of scarlet fever incidence. The spatial lag model (SLM) and spatial error model (SEM) including ordinary least squares (OLS) models were then applied to probe the association between scarlet fever incidence and meteorological including air pollution factors. (3) Results: Among the 5491 cases, more than half (62%) were male, and more than one-third (37.8%) were female, with the annual average incidence rate 14.64 per 100,000 population. Spatial autocorrelation analysis exhibited the existence of spatial dependence; therefore, we applied spatial regression models. After comparing the values of R-square, log-likelihood and the Akaike information criterion (AIC) among the three models, the OLS model (R2 = 0.0741, log likelihood = −1819.69, AIC = 3665.38), SLM (R2 = 0.0786, log likelihood = −1819.04, AIC = 3665.08) and SEM (R2 = 0.0743, log likelihood = −1819.67, AIC = 3665.36), identified that the spatial lag model (SLM) was best for model fit for the regression model. There was a positive significant association between nitrogen oxide (p = 0.027), rainfall (p = 0.036) and sunshine hour (p = 0.048), while the relative humidity (p = 0.034) had an adverse association with scarlet fever incidence in SLM. (4) Conclusions: Our findings indicated that meteorological, as well as air pollutant factors may increase the incidence of scarlet fever; these findings may help to guide scarlet fever control programs and targeting the intervention.

With a mission to graduate engineers who can create personal, economic, and societal value through a lifetime of meaningful work, KEEN (Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network) started a movement of fostering an entrepreneurial mindset in young engineers. This paper will discuss the experience and evaluation of incorporating entrepreneurial mindset learning in a freshman Introduction to Engineering course.Introduction to Engineering is a one-semester 2-credit hour freshman lecture and lab course focusing on teaching engineering design process, with students completing a half-semester long multi-disciplinary design project. In addition, technical concepts such as engineering drawing, MATLAB and basic disciplinary knowledge are taught along with the introduction of "soft skills" such as communication, teamwork and project management. This paper will discuss how KEEN's 3Cs framework, i.e., curiosity, connections and creating values, was incorporated into the existing course content centered on an open-ended design project. The impact of this addition will be evaluated through student surveys on their awareness of entrepreneurial mindset concepts.

We used a low energy electron irradiation technique to prepare graphene sheets embedded carbon (GSEC) film based on electron cyclotron resonance plasma. The particular π electronic structure of the GSEC film similar to bilayer graphene was verified by Raman spectra 2D band analyzing. The phase transition from amorphous carbon to GSEC was initiated when electron irradiation energy reached 40 eV, and the growth mechanism of GSEC was interpreted as inelastic scattering of low energy electrons. This finding indicates that the GSEC film obtained by low energy electron irradiation can be excepted for widely applications with outstanding electric properties.