This dissertation consists of three essays that evaluate various types of health care policies from the social welfare perspective. Chapter 1 introduces the main ideas and framework of this dissertation. Chapter 2 evaluates the new co-payment policy, enacted on July 15, 2005 under Taiwan’s National Health Insurance (NHI). We show...
The Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are increasingly explored in varies of fields including designing and optimizing computer systems. Recent research, such as optimizing memory/cache prefetching by ML training or predicting traffic pattern in throughput processors, also exhibits a promising future of introducing ML into computer system design and optimization. Throughput...
The research presented herein focuses on electrical assessment of oxide thin films as insulators. The current density-electric field (J-E) characteristics of four insulators of dramatically different electrical quality are assessed in terms of their operative electronic conduction mechanisms. Conduction in the two high-quality insulators is dominated by Ohmic conduction and...
Traditional bus-based interconnects are simple and easy to implement, but the scalability is greatly limited. While router-based networks-on-chip (NoCs) offer superior scalability, they also incur significant power and area overhead due to complex router structures. In this thesis, a new class of on-chip networks, referred to as Routerless (RL) NoCs,...
This thesis focuses on the problem of object tracking. Given a video, the general objective of tracking is to track the location over time of one or more targets in the image sequence. This is a very challenging task as algorithms need to deal with problems such as appearance variations,...
Incremental ADCs (IADCs) have many advantages for low-frequency high-accuracy data conversion—they are easy to multiplex between channels, need simpler digital decimation filter, and allow extended counting with a Nyquist-rate ADC. A single-loop incremental ADC was designed and fabricated in 90 nm for a biosensor interface circuit. It incorporates one integrator,...
Taiwan has undergone significant social change, particularly in the last forty years, due to economic and industrial growth. Career development intervention is increasingly urgent in helping students face upcoming challenges. This study investigates the implementation and perceived helpfulness of career development interventions in Taiwanese comprehensive high schools. A total of...
Simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) is widely useful in many cross-lingual communication scenarios, including multinational conferences and international traveling. Since text-based simultaneous machine translation (SimulMT) has achieved great success in recent years. The conventional cascaded approach for SimulST uses a pipeline of streaming ASR followed by simultaneous MT but suffers from...