Abstract
Plants gather and process information about their surroundings to make decisions that prioritize their well-being while considering the environment. These decisions are conveyed through electrical signals within and between cells, mainly in the form of action and variation potentials, in response to stimuli, including mechanical vibrations, changes in temperature, light intensity, and humidity. Although the ability of some plants, such as the Mimosa pudica, to react to sudden environmental stimuli (e.g., touch) is well known, their long-term electrical response under slow environmental changes remains not fully understood. Here, a multi-source monitoring system has been developed to collect and store electrical signals from the plant Mimosa pudica, and surrounding environmental temperature and humidity, over a period of approximately 5 days. A realtime dashboard shows the environmental temperature and variation potential (VP) from Mimosa pudica. The VP mimics the environmental temperature changes, with an associated delay. Our long-term physiological observations suggest that environmental temperature sensing in the plant Mimosa pudica can be monitored and is likely driven by bioelectricity.

Abstract
Human Activity Recognition (HAR) has been a popular research field due to the widespread of devices with sensors and computational power (e.g., smartphones and smartwatches). Applications for HAR systems have been extensively researched in recent literature, mainly due to the benefits of improving quality of life in areas like health and fitness monitoring. However, since persons have different motion patterns when performing physical activities, a HAR system would need to adapt to the characteristics of the user in order to maintain or improve accuracy. Mobile devices, such as smartphones, used to implement HAR systems, have limited resources (e.g., battery life). They also have difficulty adapting to the device's constraints to work efficiently for long periods. In this work, we present a kNN-based HAR system and an extensive study of the influence of hyperparameters (window size, overlap, distance function, and the value of k) and parameters (sampling frequency) on the system accuracy, energy consumption, and response time. We also study how hyperparameter configurations affect the model's performance for the users and the activities. Experimental results show that adapting the hyperparameters makes it possible to adjust the system's behavior to the user, the device, and the target service. These results motivate the development of a HAR system capable of automatically adapting the hyperparameters for the user, the device, and the service.

Abstract
This article presents Kadabra, a Java source-to-source compiler that allows users to make code queries, code analysis and code transformations, all user-programmable using the domain-specific language LARA. We show how Kadabra can be used as the basis for developing a runtime autotuning and adaptivity framework, able to adapt existing source Java code in order to take advantage of runtime autotuning. Specifically, this article presents the framework, consisting of Kadabra and an API for runtime adaptivity. We show the use of the framework to extend Java applications with autotuning and runtime adaptivity mechanisms to target performance improvement and/or energy saving goals.(c) 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Abstract
[No abstract available]

Abstract
A common approach for improving performance uses FPGAs to accelerate critical code regions, which often involves two processes: hardware/software partitioning, which identifies regions to offload to the FPGA; and optimizing those regions (e.g., through HLS directives). As both processes are separate and usually applied in sequence, the interplay between them is unnatural, and it is unclear how the choices made in one step can benefit the choices made in the other step. This paper presents our work-in-progress for combining partitioning and optimization into a single holistic process. First, our source-to-source compiler builds a task-based representation from the input application. Then, a greedy algorithm builds clusters of tasks and assigns each cluster to either hardware (FPGA) or software (CPU). The algorithm iteratively refines the clusters and offloading decisions by: a) minimizing the communication costs between clusters by assigning tasks that work with shared data to the same cluster; b) reducing the global execution time by applying code optimizations to the tasks in each cluster. We show the impact of our holistic approach to a motivating edge detection example and compare the results when applying partitioning and code optimizations as independent steps. The results show that a holistic partitioning can lead to a speedup of up to 28.7x when compared to a simple offloading of the application to an FPGA.

Abstract
Haptic feedback in Virtual Reality is commonly provided through wearable or grounded devices adapted to specific scenarios and situations. Shape-changing devices allow for the physical representation of different virtual objects but are still a minority, complex, and usually have long transformation times. We present Shape-a-getti, a novel ungrounded, non-wearable, and graspable haptic device that can quickly change between different radially symmetrical shapes. It uses a single actuator to rotate several identical poles distributed along a radius to render the different shapes. The format of the poles defines the possible shapes, and in our prototype, we used one that could render concave, straight, and convex shapes with different radii. We conducted a user evaluation with 21 participants asking them to recognize virtual objects by grasping the Shape-a-getti. Despite having difficulties distinguishing between some objects with very similar shapes, participants could successfully identify virtual objects with different shapes rendered by our device. (c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).