In this paper, based on the policy of model predictive control, a new method of predictive pinning control is proposed for the consensus problem of multi-agent systems. Pinning control is a method that the external control input is added to some agents (pinning nodes), e.g., leaders. By the external control input, consensus to a certain target value (not the average of the initial states) and faster consensus are achieved. In the proposed method, the external control input is calculated by the controller node connected to only pinning nodes. Since the states of all agents are required in calculation of the external control input, communication delays must be considered. The proposed algorithm includes not only calculation of the external control input but also delay compensation. The effectiveness of the proposed method is presented by a numerical example.

Electrophoretic deposition (EPD) usingpolydimethylsiloxane(PDMS)-based organic-inorganic hybrid materials as binders can be used to prepare alumina-binder composites on metal substrates. Herein, we investigated the deposition mechanism of PDMS-based polymers. The composition and porosity of EPD composites can be controlled by adjusting the EPD condition, and shape of alumina particles.

In this work, gold powder made from gold leaf investigated to have the potential as a filler of conductive ink. The resistance of a conductive film decreased from 6.2kΩ to 1 Ω by adding only 2.0wt% of gold powder to conductive polymer (PEDOT:PSS) ink. The change of the resistance depends on the characteristics of gold powder. Gold powder with smaller and uniform sizes and good dispersibility is beneficial to form a continuous percolation network.

We report the control of threshold voltage (Vth) for low voltage (5V) operation in OFET by using double gate dielectric layers composed of poly (vinyl cinnamate) and SiO2. We succeeded in realizing a driving voltage of -5V and Vth shift by c.a. 1.0V. And programmed Vth was almost unchanged for 104s, where the relative change of Vth remains more than 99%.

We have developed the flexible dual-gate OFET based pressure sensor using a thin polyethylene naphthalate (PEN, 25 µm) film as a substrate. The performance was equivalent to that fabricated on the glass substrate, and it could also be used on the curved surface. Drain current in the flexible pressure sensor was increased according to the pressure load without application of gate voltage. The magnitude of the change in drain current with respect to pressure application was about 2.5 times larger than that for the device on the glass substrate.

We propose a new method of differential fault attack, which is based on the nibble-group differential diffusion property of the lightweight block cipher MIBS. On the basis of the statistical regularity of differential distribution of the S-box, we establish a statistical model and then analyze the relationship between the number of faults injections, the probability of attack success, and key recovering bits. Theoretically, time complexity of recovering the main key reduces to 22 when injecting 3 groups of faults (12 nibbles in total) in 30,31 and 32 rounds, which is the optimal condition. Furthermore, we calculate the expectation of the number of fault injection groups needed to recover 62 bits in main key, which is 3.87. Finally, experimental data verifies the correctness of the theoretical model.

Cloud computing has attracted a growing number of enterprises to move their business to the cloud because of the associated operational and cost benefits. Improving availability is one of the major concerns of cloud application owners because modern applications generally comprise a large number of components and failures are common at scale. Fault tolerance enables an application to continue operating properly when failure occurs, but fault tolerance strategy is typically employed for the most important components because of financial concerns. Therefore, identifying important components has become a critical research issue. To address this problem, we propose a failure-sensitive structure-based component ranking approach (FSCRank), which integrates component failure impact and application structure information into component importance evaluation. An iterative ranking algorithm is developed according to the structural characteristics of cloud applications. The experimental results show that FSCRank outperforms the other two structure-based ranking algorithms for cloud applications. In addition, factors that affect application availability optimization are analyzed and summarized. The experimental results suggest that the availability of cloud applications can be greatly improved by implementing fault tolerance strategy for the important components identified by FSCRank.

The k-edge-connectivity augmentation problem for a specified set of vertices (kECA-SV for short) is defined by “Given a graph G=(V, E) and a subset Γ ⊆ V, find a minimum set E' of edges such that G'=(V, E ∪ E') has at least k edge-disjoint paths between any pair of vertices in Γ.” Let σ be the edge-connectivity of Γ (that is, G has at least σ edge-disjoint paths between any pair of vertices in Γ). We propose an algorithm for (σ+1)ECA-SV which is done in O(|Γ|) maximum flow operations. Then the time complexity is O(σ2|Γ||V|+|E|) if a given graph is sparse, or O(|Γ||V||BG|log(|V|2/|BG|)+|E|) if dense, where |BG| is the number of pairs of adjacent vertices in G. Also mentioned is an O(|V||E|+|V|2 log |V|) time algorithm for a special case where σ is equal to the edge-connectivity of G and an O(|V|+|E|) time one for σ ≤ 2.

Large-scale distributed antenna systems (LS-DASs) are gaining increasing interest and emerging as highly promising candidates for future wireless communications. To improve the user's quality of service (QoS) in these systems, this study proposes a user cooperation aided clustering approach based on device-centric architectures; it enables multi-user multiple-input multiple-output transmissions with non-reciprocal setups. We actively use device-to-device communication techniques to achieve the sharing of user information and try to form clusters on user side instead of the traditional way that performs clustering on base station (BS) side in data offloading. We further adopt a device-centric architecture to break the limits of the classical BS-centric cellular structure. Moreover, we derive an approximate expression to calculate the user rate for LS-DASs with employment of zero-forcing precoding and consideration of inter-cluster interference. Numerical results indicate that the approximate expression predicts the user rate with a lower computational cost than is indicated by computer simulation, and the proposed approach provides better user experience for, in particular, the users who have unacceptable QoS.

When time difference of arrival (TDOA)-based bearing measurements are used in passive triangulation, the accuracy of localization depends on the geometric relationship between the emitter and the sensors. In particular, the localization accuracy varies with the geometric conditions in TDOA-based direction finding (DF) for bearing measurement and lines of bearing (LOBs) crossing for triangulation. To obtain an accurate estimate in passive triangulation using TDOA-based bearing measurements, we shall use these bearings selectively by considering geometric dilution of precision (GDOP) between the emitter and the sensors. To achieve this goal, we first define two GDOPs related to TDOA-based DF and LOBs crossing geometries, and then propose a new hybrid GDOP by combining these GDOPs for a better selection of bearings. Subsequently, two bearings with the lowest hybrid GDOP condition are chosen as the inputs to a triangulation localization algorithm. In simulations, the proposed method shows its enhancement to the localization accuracy.

We describe the preparation of an α-phenyl-4'-(diphenylamino)stilbene (TPA) single crystal and the evaluation of its hole transport property. Based on the characterization using optical microscopy, polarizing microscopy, and X-ray diffraction, a large-scale TPA single crystal of dimensions 7.0×0.9×0.8mm is successfully synthesized using a solution method based on the solubility and supersolubility curves of the TPA. Notably, the current in the long-axis direction is larger than those in the short-axis and thickness directions (i(long) > i(short) > i(thickness)), which reveals the anisotropic charge transfer of the TPA single crystal. The observed anisotropic conductivity is well explained by the orientation of the triphenylamine unit in the TPA single crystal. Furthermore, the activation energy of the long-axis direction in the TPA single crystal is lower than that of the short-axis in TPA and all the axes in the α-phenyl-4'-[bis(4-methylphenyl)amino]stilbene single crystal reported in our previous study.

Word order is one of the most significant differences between the Chinese and Vietnamese. In the phrase-based statistical machine translation, the reordering model will learn reordering rules from bilingual corpora. If the bilingual corpora are large and good enough, the reordering rules are exact and coverable. However, Chinese-Vietnamese is a low-resource language pair, the extraction of reordering rules is limited. This leads to the quality of reordering in Chinese-Vietnamese machine translation is not high. In this paper, we have combined Chinese dependency relation and Chinese-Vietnamese word alignment results in order to pre-order Chinese word order to be suitable to Vietnamese one. The experimental results show that our methodology has improved the machine translation performance compared to the translation system using only the reordering models of phrase-based statistical machine translation.

The gap states of tetratetracontane (C44H90; TTC), which is a model oligomer of polyethylene, was examined by using high-sensitivity UV photoemission spectroscopy (HS-UPS). The high sensitivity enabled us to directly observe the weak gap states distributed in the HOMO-LUMO gap from the valence band top to 3.0 eV below the vacuum level. On the basis of the density-of-states derived from UPS results, the tribocharging nature of polyethylene was discussed in comparison with our previous result for nylon-6,6 film.

This paper investigates energy-efficient resource allocation problem for the wireless power transfer (WPT) enabled multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. In the considered systems, the sensor nodes (SNs) are firstly powered by WPT from the power beacon (PB) with a large scale of antennas. Then, the SNs use the harvested energy to transmit the data to the base station (BS) with multiple antennas. The problem of optimizing the energy efficiency objective is formulated with the consideration of maximum transmission power of the PB and the quality of service (QoS) of the SNs. By adopting fractional programming, the energy-efficient optimization problem is firstly converted into a subtractive form. Then, a joint power and time allocation algorithm based on the block coordinate descent and Dinkelbach method is proposed to maximize energy efficiency. Finally, simulation results show the proposed algorithm achieves a good compromise between the spectrum efficiency and total power consumption.

MU-MIMO (Multi-User Multiple Input and Multiple Output) has been considered as a fundamental technology for simultaneous communications between a base station and multiple users. This is because it can generate a large virtual MIMO channel between a base station and multiple user terminals with effective utilization of wireless resources. As a method of implementing MU-MIMO downlink, Block Diagonalization (BD) was proposed in which the transmission weights are determined to cancel interference between multiple user terminals. On the other hand, Block Maximum Signal-to-Noise ratio (BMSN) was proposed which determines the transmission weights to enhance the gain for each user terminal in addition to the interference cancellation. As a feature, BMSN has a pseudo-noise for controlling the null depth to the interference. In this paper, to enhance further the BMSN performance, we propose the BMSN algorithm that has the pseudo-noise determined according to receiver SNR. As a result of computer simulation, it is confirmed that the proposed BMSN algorithm shows the significantly improved performance in evaluation of bit error rate (BER) and achievable bit rate (ABR).

This letter proposes a new face sketch recognition method. Given a query sketch and face photos in a database, the proposed method first synthesizes pseudo sketches by computing the locality sensitive histogram and dense illumination invariant features from the resized face photos, then extracts discriminative features by computing histogram of averaged oriented gradients on the query sketch and pseudo sketches, and finally find a match with the shortest cosine distance in the feature space. It achieves accuracy comparable to the state-of-the-art while showing much more robustness than the existing face sketch recognition methods.

On surfaces of tris-(8-hydroxyquinolate) aluminum (Alq) and tris(7-propyl-8-hydroxyquinolinato) aluminum (Al7p) thin-films, positive and negative polarization charges appear, respectively, owing to spontaneous orientation of these polar molecules. Alq is a typical electron transport material where electrons are injected from cathode. Because the polarization charge exists at the Alq/cathode interface, it is likely that it affects the electron injection process because of Coulomb interaction. In order to evaluate an impact of polarization charge on electron injection from cathode, electron only devices (EODs) composed of Alq or Al7p were prepared and evaluated by displacement current measurement. We found that Alq-EOD has lower resistance than Al7p-EOD, indicating that the positive polarization charge at Alq/cathode interface enhances the electron injection due to Coulomb attraction, while the electron injection is suppressed by the negative polarization charge at the Al7p/Al interface. These results clearly suggest that it is necessary to design organic semiconductor devices by taking polarization charge into account.

This paper presents an approach to analyze and model tasks of machines being operated. The executions of the tasks were captured through egocentric vision. Each task was decomposed into a sequence of physical hand-machine interactions, which are described with touch-based hotspots and interaction patterns. Modeling the tasks was achieved by integrating the experiences of multiple experts and using a hidden Markov model (HMM). Here, we present the results of more than 70 recorded egocentric experiences of the operation of a sewing machine. Our methods show good potential for the detection of hand-machine interactions and modeling of machine operation tasks.

Saliency detection is widely used in many vision tasks like image retrieval, compression and person re-identification. The deep-learning methods have got great results but most of them focused more on the performance ignored the efficiency of models, which were hard to transplant into other applications. So how to design a efficient model has became the main problem. In this letter, we propose parallel feature network, a saliency model which is built on convolution neural network (CNN) by a parallel method. Parallel dilation blocks are first used to extract features from different layers of CNN, then a parallel upsampling structure is adopted to upsample feature maps. Finally saliency maps are obtained by fusing summations and concatenations of feature maps. Our final model built on VGG-16 is much smaller and faster than existing saliency models and also achieves state-of-the-art performance.

In this letter, a construction of asymmetric Gaussian integer zero correlation zone (ZCZ) sequence sets is presented based on interleaving and filtering. The proposed approach can provide optimal or almost optimal single Gaussian integer ZCZ sequence sets. In addition, arbitrary two sequences from different sets have inter-set zero cross-correlation zone (ZCCZ). The resultant sequence sets can be used in the multi-cell QS-CDMA system to reduce the inter-cell interference and increase the transmission data.