Mn1-xZnxFe2O4 thin films with various Zn contents, 300 nm in thickness, were synthesized on glass substrates directly by electroless plating in aqueous solution at 90 without a heat treatment. With XRD, SEM, VSM, the crystallographic structure, morphology of the films and the macroscopic magnetic properties were characterized. The Mn-Zn ferrite films have a single phase spinel structure and well-crystallized columnar grains grow perpendicularly to the substrate. The change of the coercivity is not consistent with that of the bulk materials. As the Zn content in the films increases, the value of Hc decreases firstly, and then increases. At x=0.5, the minimum value of Hc is 3.7 kA/m and the value of Ms is 419.6 kA/m. The hyperfine magnetic fields, cation occupations and the distribution of the magnetic moments in film plane were studied by the conversion electron Mossbauer spectroscopy (CEMS).

Buffer insertion plays a great role in modern global interconnect optimization. But too many buffers exhaust routing resources, and result in the rise of the power dissipation. Unfortunately, simplified delay models used by most of the present buffer insertion algorithms may introduce redundant buffers due to the delay estimation errors, whereas accurate delay models expand the solution space significantly, resulting in unacceptable runtime. Moreover, the power dissipation problem becomes a dominant factor in the state-of-the-art IC design. Not only transistor but also interconnect should be taken into consideration in the power calculation, which makes us have to use an accurate power model to calculate the total power dissipation. In this paper, we present two stochastic optimization methods, simulated annealing and solution space smoothing, which use accurate delay and power models to construct buffered routing trees with considerations of buffer/wire sizing, routing obstacles and delay and power optimization. Experimental results show our methods can save much of the buffer area and the power dissipation with better solutions, and for the cases with pins ≤ 15, the runtime of solution space smoothing is tens of times faster.

The current orthogonal cooperative system (OCS) achieves diversity through the use of relays and the consumption of an additional time slot (TS). To guarantee the orthogonality of the received signal and avoid the mutual interference at the destination, the source has to be mute in the second TS. Consequently, the spectral efficiency (SE) is halved. In this paper, linear constellation precoded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with index modulation (LCP-OFDM-IM) based OCS is proposed, where the source activates the complementary subcarriers to convey the symbols over two TSs. Hence the source can consecutively transmit information to the destination without the mutual interference. Compared with the current OFDM based OCS, the LCP-OFDM-IM based OCS can achieve a higher SE, since the subcarrier activation patterns (SAPs) can be exploited to convey additional information. Furthermore, the optimal precoder, in the sense of maximizing the minimum Euclidean distance of the symbols conveyed on each subcarrier over two TSs, is provided. Simulation results show the superiority of the LCP-OFDM-IM based OCS over the current OFDM based OCS.

Context-aware systems detect user's physical and social contexts based on sensor networks, and provide services that adapt to the user accordingly. Representing, detecting, and managing the contexts are important issues in context-aware systems. Composition of contexts is a useful method for these works, since it can detect a context by automatically composing small pieces of information to discover service. Danger-aware services are a kind of context-aware services which need description of relations between a user and his/her surrounding objects and between users. However when applying the existing composition methods to danger-aware services, they show the following shortcomings that (1) they have not provided an explicit method for representing composition of multi-user' contexts, (2) there is no flexible reasoning mechanism based on similarity of contexts, so that they can just provide services exactly following the predefined context reasoning rules. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a two-stage composition method based on context similarity to solve the above problems. The first stage is composition of the useful information to represent the context for a single user. The second stage is composition of multi-users' contexts to provide services by considering the relation of users. Finally the danger degree of the detected context is computed by using context similarity between the detected context and the predefined context. Context is dynamically represented based on two-stage composition rules and a Situation theory based Ontology, which combines the advantages of Ontology and Situation theory. We implement the system in an indoor ubiquitous environment, and evaluate the system through two experiments with the support of subjects. The experiment results show the method is effective, and the accuracy of danger detection is acceptable to a danger-aware system.

Simple half-duplex repetition-based relaying protocols can achieve spatial diversity at the expense of additional relaying signals in the time domain. In this paper, a linear unitary precoder based on a singular vector for cooperative systems with the amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying protocol is proposed in order to improve spectral efficiency. An exact expression of the precoder design is first derived for the case of equal power allocation. Then, water-filling power allocation is used in conjunction with the precoder to further increase the system capacity, where the precoder matrix is generated with an iterative process. From the implementation point of view, the channel state information (CSI) has to be estimated and quantized in systems, the detail of which is described in the sequel. The adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) technique with the proposed precoder is also discussed to achieve high throughput performance. Finally, numerical and simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique in improving capacity and throughput.

Automatic recognition of finger gestures can be used for promotion of life quality. For example, a senior citizen can control the home appliance, call for help in emergency, or even communicate with others through simple finger gestures. Here, we focus on one-stroke finger gesture, which are intuitive to be remembered and performed. In this paper, we proposed and evaluated an accelerometer-based method for detecting the predefined one-stroke finger gestures from the data collected using a MEMS 3D accelerometer worn on the index finger. As alternative to the optoelectronic, sonic and ultrasonic approaches, the accelerometer-based method is featured as self-contained, cost-effective, and can be used in noisy or private space. A compact wireless sensing mote integrated with the accelerometer, called MagicRing, is developed to be worn on the finger for real data collection. A general definition on one-stroke gesture is given out, and 12 kinds of one-stroke finger gestures are selected from human daily activities. A set of features is extracted among the candidate feature set including both traditional features like standard deviation, energy, entropy, and frequency of acceleration and a new type of feature called relative feature. Both subject-independent and subject-dependent experiment methods were evaluated on three kinds of representative classifiers. In the subject-independent experiment among 20 subjects, the decision tree classifier shows the best performance recognizing the finger gestures with an average accuracy rate for 86.92 %. In the subject-dependent experiment, the nearest neighbor classifier got the highest accuracy rate for 97.55 %.

Recently, fuzzy set theory has been widely employed in building portfolio selection models where uncertainty plays a role. In these models, future security returns are generally taken for fuzzy variables and mathematical models are then built to maximize the investment profit according to a given risk level or to minimize a risk level based on a fixed profit level. Based on existing works, this paper proposes a portfolio selection model based on fuzzy birandom variables. Two original contributions are provided by the study: First, the concept of technical analysis is combined with fuzzy set theory to use the security returns as fuzzy birandom variables. Second, the fuzzy birandom Value-at-Risk (VaR) is used to build our model, which is called the fuzzy birandom VaR-based portfolio selection model (FBVaR-PSM). The VaR can directly reflect the largest loss of a selected case at a given confidence level and it is more sensitive than other models and more acceptable for general investors than conventional risk measurements. To solve the FBVaR-PSM, in some special cases when the security returns are taken for trapezoidal, triangular or Gaussian fuzzy birandom variables, several crisp equivalent models of the FBVaR-PSM are derived, which can be handled by any linear programming solver. In general, the fuzzy birandom simulation-based particle swarm optimization algorithm (FBS-PSO) is designed to find the approximate optimal solution. To illustrate the proposed model and the behavior of the FBS-PSO, two numerical examples are introduced based on investors' different risk attitudes. Finally, we analyze the experimental results and provide a discussion of some existing approaches.

A comprehensive method applying a nonlinear frequency compression (FC) as complementary to multi-band loudness compensation is proposed, which is able to improve loudness compensation and simultaneously increase high-frequency speech intelligibility for digital hearing aids. The proposed nonlinear FC (NLFC) improves the conventional methods in the aspect that the compression ratio (CR) is adjusted based on the speech intelligibility percentage in different frequency ranges. Then, an adaptive wide dynamic range compression (AWDRC) with a time-varying CR is applied to achieve adaptive loudness compensation. The experimental test results show that the mean speech identification is improved in comparison with the state-of-art methods.

This paper first reviews the state-of-the-art noise reduction methods and points out their vulnerability in noise reduction performance and speech quality, especially under the low signal-noise ratios (SNR) environments. Then this paper presents an improved perceptual multiband spectral subtraction (MBSS) noise reduction algorithm (NRA) and a novel robust voice activity detection (VAD) based on the amended sub-band SNR. The proposed SNR-based VAD can considerably increase the accuracy of discrimination between noise and speech frame. The simulation results show that the proposed NRA has better segmental SNR (segSNR) and perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) performance than other noise reduction algorithms especially under low SNR environments. In addition, a fully operational digital hearing aid chip is designed and fabricated in the 0.13 µm CMOS process based on the proposed NRA. The final chip implementation shows that the whole chip dissipates 1.3 mA at the 1.2 V operation. The acoustic test result shows that the maximum output sound pressure level (OSPL) is 114.6 dB SPL, the equivalent input noise is 5.9 dB SPL, and the total harmonic distortion is 2.5%. So the proposed digital hearing aid chip is a promising candidate for high performance hearing-aid systems.

A low complexity channel estimation scheme using data-dependent superimposed training (DDST) is proposed in this paper, where the pilots are inserted in more than one block, rather than the single block of the original DDST. Comparing with the original DDST (which improves the performance of channel estimation at the cost of huge computational overheads), the proposed DDST scheme improves the performance of channel estimation with only a slight increase in the consumption of computation resources. The optimal precoder is designed to minimize the data distortion caused by the rank-deficient precoding. The optimal pilots and placement are also provided to improve the performance of channel estimation. In addition, the impact of power allocation between the data and pilots on symbol detection is analyzed, the optimal power allocation scheme is derived to maximize the effective signal-to-noise ratio at the receiver. Simulation results are presented to show the computational advantage of the proposed scheme, and the advantages of the optimal pilots and power allocation scheme.

The development of the electricity market enables us to provide electricity of varied quality and price in order to fulfill power consumers' needs. Such customers choices should influence the process of adjusting power generation and spinning reserve, and, as a result, change the structure of a unit commitment optimization problem (UCP). To build a unit commitment model that considers customer choices, we employ fuzzy variables in this study to better characterize customer requirements and forecasted future power loads. To measure system reliability and determine the schedule of real power generation and spinning reserve, fuzzy Value-at-Risk (VaR) is utilized in building the model, which evaluates the peak values of power demands under given confidence levels. Based on the information obtained using fuzzy VaR, we proposed a heuristic algorithm called local convergence-averse binary particle swarm optimization (LCA-PSO) to solve the UCP. The proposed model and algorithm are used to analyze several test systems. Comparisons between the proposed algorithm and the conventional approaches show that the LCA-PSO performs better in finding the optimal solutions.

Context awareness is viewed as one of the most important goals in the pervasive computing paradigm. As one kind of context awareness, danger awareness describes and detects dangerous situations around a user, and provides services such as warning to protect the user from dangers. One important problem arising in danger-aware systems is that the description/definition of dangerous situations becomes more and more complex, since many factors have to be considered in such description, which brings a big burden to the developers/users and thereby reduces the reliability of the system. It is necessary to develop a flexible reasoning method, which can ease the description/definition of dangerous situations by reasoning dangers using limited specified/predefined contexts/rules, and increase system reliability by detecting unspecified dangerous situations. Some reasoning mechanisms based on context similarity were proposed to address the above problems. However, the current mechanisms are not so accurate in some cases, since the similarity is computed from only basic knowledge, e.g. nature property, such as material, size etc, and category information, i.e. they may cause false positive and false negative problems. To solve the above problems, in this paper we propose a new flexible and accurate method from feature point of view. Firstly, a new ontology explicitly integrating basic knowledge and danger feature is designed for computing similarity in danger-aware systems. Then a new method is proposed to compute object similarity from both basic knowledge and danger feature point of views when calculating context similarity. The method is implemented in an indoor ubiquitous test bed and evaluated through experiments. The experiment result shows that the accuracy of system can be effectively increased based on the comparison between system decision and estimation of human observers, comparing with the existing methods. And the burden of defining dangerous situations can be decreased by evaluating trade-off between the system's accuracy and burden of defining dangerous situations.

Indoor fingerprint location based on WiFi in large-scale indoor parking lots is more and more widely employed for vehicle lookup. However, the challenge is to ensure the location functionality because of the particularity and complexities of the indoor parking lot environment. To reduce the need to deploy of reference points (RPs) and the offline sampling workload, a partition-fitting fingerprint algorithm (P-FP) is proposed. To improve the location accuracy of the target, the PS-FP algorithm, a sampling importance resampling (SIR) particle filter with threshold based on P-FP, is further proposed. Firstly, the entire indoor parking lot is partitioned and the environmental coefficients of each partitioned section are gained by using the polynomial fitting model. To improve the quality of the offline fingerprint database, an error characteristic matrix is established using the difference between the fitting values and the actual measured values. Thus, the virtual RPs are deployed and C-means clustering is utilized to reduce the amount of online computation. To decrease the fluctuation of location coordinates, the SIR particle filter with a threshold setting is adopted to optimize the location coordinates. Finally, the optimal threshold value is obtained by comparing the mean location error. Test results demonstrated that PS-FP could achieve high location accuracy with few RPs and the mean location error is only about 0.7m. The cumulative distribution function (CDF) show that, using PS-FP, 98% of location errors are within 2m. Compared with the weighted K-nearest neighbors (WKNN) algorithm, the location accuracy by PS-FP exhibit an 84% improvement.

Self-updating encryption (SUE) is a new cryptographic scheme produced in the recent work of Lee, Choi, Lee, Park and Yung (Asiacrypt 2013) to achieve a time-updating mechanism for revocation. In SUE, a ciphetext and a private key are associated with the time and a user can decrypt a ciphertext only if its time is earlier than that of his private key. But one drawback is the encryption computational overhead scales with the size of the time which makes it a possible bottleneck for some applications. To address this problem, we provide a new technique for the SUE that splits the encryption algorithm into two phases: an offline phase and an online phase. In the offline phase, an intermediate ciphertext header is generated before it knows the concrete encryption time. Then an online phase is implemented to rapidly generate an SUE ciphertext header when the time becomes known by making use of the intermediate ciphertext header. In addition, two different online encryption constructions are proposed in view of different time level taking 50% as the boundary. At last, we prove the security of our scheme and provide the performance analysis which shows that the vast majority of computational overhead can be moved to the offline phase. One motivating application for this technique is resource-constrained mobile devices: the preparation work can be done when the mobile devices are plugged into a power source, then they can later rapidly perform SUE operations on the move without significantly consuming the battery.

In the field of action recognition, Spatio-Temporal Interest Points (STIPs)-based features have shown high efficiency and robustness. However, most of state-of-the-art work to describe STIPs, they typically focus on 2-dimensions (2D) images, which ignore information in 3D spatio-temporal space. Besides, the compact representation of descriptors should be considered due to the costs of storage and computational time. In this paper, a novel local descriptor named 3D Gradient LBP is proposed, which extends the traditional descriptor Local Binary Patterns (LBP) into 3D spatio-temporal space. The proposed descriptor takes advantage of the neighbourhood information of cuboids in three dimensions, which accounts for its excellent descriptive power for the distribution of grey-level space. Experiments on three challenging datasets (KTH, Weizmann and UT Interaction) validate the effectiveness of our approach in the recognition of human actions.

In this paper, the problem on secure communication based on chaos synchronization is investigated. The dual channel information transmitting technology is proposed to increase the security of secure communication system. Based on chaos synchronization, a new digital secure communication scheme is presented for a class of master-slave systems. Finally some numerical simulation examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the given results.

The complexity and scale of Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) are growing as more processing elements and memory devices are implemented on chips. However, under strict power budgets, it is also critical to lower the power consumption of NoCs for the sake of energy efficiency. In this paper, we therefore present three novel input unit designs for on-chip routers attempting to shrink their power consumption while still conserving the network performance. The key idea behind our designs is to organize buffers in the input units with characteristics of the network traffic in mind; as in our observations, only a small portion of the network traffic are long packets (composed of multiple flits), which means, it is fair to implement hybrid, asymmetric and reconfigurable buffers so that they are mainly targeting at short packets (only having a single flit), hence the smaller power consumption and area overhead. Evaluations show that our hybrid, asymmetric and reconfigurable input unit designs can achieve an average reduction of energy consumption per flit by 45%, 52.3% and 56.2% under 93.6% (for hybrid designs) and 66.3% (for asymmetric and reconfigurable designs) of the original router area, respectively. Meanwhile, we only observe minor degradation in network latency (ranging from 18.4% to 1.5%, on average) with our proposals.

The image-to-image translation aims to learn a mapping between the source and target domains. For improving visual quality, the majority of previous works adopt multi-stage techniques to refine coarse results in a progressive manner. In this work, we present a novel approach for generating plausible details by only introducing a group of intermediate supervisions without cascading multiple stages. Specifically, we propose a Laplacian Pyramid Transformation Generative Adversarial Network (LapTransGAN) to simultaneously transform components in different frequencies from the source domain to the target domain within only one stage. Hierarchical perceptual and gradient penalization are utilized for learning consistent semantic structures and details at each pyramid level. The proposed model is evaluated based on various metrics, including the similarity in feature maps, reconstruction quality, segmentation accuracy, similarity in details, and qualitative appearances. Our experiments show that LapTransGAN can achieve a much better quantitative performance than both the supervised pix2pix model and the unsupervised CycleGAN model. Comprehensive ablation experiments are conducted to study the contribution of each component.

We describe a novel idea to improve machine translation by combining multiple candidate translations and extra translations. Without manual work, extra translations can be generated by identifying and hybridizing the syntactic equivalents in candidate translations. Candidate and extra translations are then combined on sentence level for better general translation performance.

Dynamic spectrum access is the key approach in cognitive wireless regional area networks, and it is adopted by secondary users to access the licensed radio spectrum opportunistically. In order to realize real-time secondary spectrum usage, a dynamic spectrum access model based on stochastic differential games is proposed to realize dynamic spectrum allocation; a Nash equilibrium solution to the model is given and analyzed in this paper. From an overall perspective, the relationships between available spectrum percentage and the spectrum access rate are studied. Changes in the available spectrum percentage of the cognitive wireless regional area networks involve a deterministic component and a stochastic component which depends upon an r-dimensional Wiener process. The Wiener process represents an accumulation of random influences over the interval, and it reflects stochastic and time-varying properties of the available spectrum percentage. Simulation results show that the dynamic spectrum access model is efficient, and it reflects the time-varying radio frequency environment. Differential games are useful tools for the spectrum access and management in the time-varying radio environment.