Even with the recent development of new types of social networking services such as microblogs, Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) remains popular for local communities and vertical discussions. These BBS sites have high volume of traffic everyday with user discussions on a variety of topics. Therefore it is difficult for BBS visitors to find the posts that they are interested in from the large amount of discussion threads. We attempt to explore several main characteristics of BBS, including organizational flexibility of BBS texts, high data volume and aging characteristic of BBS topics. Based on these characteristics, we propose a novel method of Online Topic Detection (OTD) on BBS, which mainly includes a representative post selection procedure based on Markov chain model and an efficient topic clustering algorithm with candidate topic set generation based on Aging Theory. Experimental results show that our method improves the performance of OTD in BBS environment in both detection accuracy and time efficiency. In addition, analysis on the aging characteristic of discussion topics shows that the generation and aging of topics on BBS is very fast, so it is wise to introduce candidate topic set generation strategy based on Aging Theory into the topic clustering algorithm.

A switched-current integrated circuit, which realizes the chaotic neuron model, is presented. The circuit mainly consists of CMOS inverters that are used as transconductance amplifiers and nonlinear elements. The chip was fabricated using a 1.2 µm HP CMOS process. A single neuron cell occupies only 0.0076 mm2, which represents an area smaller than the one occupied by a standard bonding pad. The circuit operation was tested at a clock frequency of 2 MHz.