Forty years after the first application of Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUIDs) [1], [2] for geophysical purposes, they have recently become a valued tool for mineral exploration. One of the most common applications is time domain (or transient) electromagnetics (TEM), an active method, where the inductive response from the ground to a changing current (mostly rectangular) in a loop on the surface is measured. After the current in the transmitter coil is switched, eddy currents are excited in the ground, which decay in a manner dependent on the conductivity of the underlying geologic structure. The resulting secondary magnetic field at the surface is measured during the off-time by a receiver coil (induced voltage) or by a magnetometer (e.g. SQUID or fluxgate). The recorded transient signal quality is improved by stacking positive and negative decays. Alternatively, the TEM results can be inverted and give the electric conductivity of the ground over depth. Since SQUIDs measure the magnetic field with high sensitivity and a constant frequency transfer function, they show a superior performance compared to conventional induction coils, especially in the presence of strong conductors. As the primary field, and especially its slew rate, are quite large, SQUID systems need to have a large slew rate and dynamic range. Any flux jump would make the use of standard stacking algorithms impossible. IPHT and Supracon are developing and producing SQUID systems based on low temperature superconductors (LTS, in our case niobium), which are now state-of-the-art. Due to the large demand, we are additionally supplying systems with high temperature superconductors (HTS, in our case YBCO). While the low temperature SQUID systems have a better performance (noise and slew rate), the high temperature SQUID systems are easier to handle in the field. The superior performance of SQUIDs compared to induction coils is the most important factor for the detection of good conductors at large depth or ore bodies underneath conductive overburden.

Many wireless communication systems use a relay station for cooperative diversity or cell coverage extension. In this letter, an efficient partial single relay selection scheme is proposed for wireless communications. The conventional schemes such as the best harmonic mean and the threshold-based relay selection should know channel state informaion (CSI), or noise variance at all stations in advance. But the proposed scheme does not require any priori information. It uses a characteristic of the repeated signal pattern at candidates of the relay station. Simulation results show that the performance of proposed scheme is very close to the best harmonic mean relay selection scheme as one of the optimal relay selection schemes.

A new trigger circuit based on up/down counter is proposed. This trigger circuit consists of a up/down counter and a pulse conversion circuit. Compared with a trigger circuit based on 32-bit counter, the proposed trigger circuit occupies less circuit area and consumes less power consumption, while the trigger process can be inversed, increasing the controllability of the Trojan.

Users of wireless mobile devices need Internet access not only when they stay at home or office, but also when they travel. It may be desirable for such users to select a "longcut route" from their current location to his/her destination that has longer travel time than the shortest route, but provides a better mobile wireless environment. In this paper, we formulate the above situation as the optimization problem of “optimal longcut route selection”, which requires us to find the best route concerning the wireless environment subject to a travel time constraint. For this new problem, we show NP-hardness, propose two pseudo-polynomial time algorithms, and experimental evaluation of the algorithms.

In this paper, we design a stealthy GSM phone identity catcher. As the GSM protocols do not mandate the authentication of BSes (Base Stations) to MSes (Mobile Stations), fake BSes can be implemented to lure victims to register with and thereby intercept crucial information of the user, including their identities. However, the straightforward implementation of GSM phone identity catcher can be easily perceived by users employing detection software due to such phenomena as phone interface changes and service interruptions. In this paper, we propose several effective mechanisms, such as smart configuration of the fake BSes, quick attachment/detachment and service relay, to make the catching process invisible to users and software. Real world experiments have been conducted and the results prove the efficiency and stealth of our proposed GSM phone identity catcher. We hope our work could help to enhance the effectiveness of IMSI catching attack and thereby alert the industry to design stronger authentication protocol in communication systems.

A compact composite right/left-handed transmission-line (CRLH TL) stub resonator is presented. The bandpass frequency of the resonator and the adjacent transmission-zeros are determined by the negative order resonance modes of the stub line. We demonstrate that these resonance frequencies can be arbitrarily controlled by using non-identical, unbalanced unit cells, leading to enhanced loaded-Q as well as unloaded-Q. We show that despite the presence of lumped element loss the unloaded-Q is enhanced by a factor of 2 compared to that of microstrip line as a result of nearly-zero group velocity. As a consequence, the loaded-Q can be increased without incurring significant insertion loss as in the case of conventional stub resonators on the same substrate. The physical mechanisms of the distinct features are discussed based on an equivalent dispersion diagram, a concept introduced to model general one-port CRLH TL used as a stub line.

A readout technique using single-flux-quantum (SFQ) circuits enables superconducting single photon detectors (SSPDs) to operate at further high-speed, where a mutually-coupled dc-to-SFQ (MC-dc/SFQ) converter is used as an interface between SSPDs and SFQ circuits. In this work, we investigated pulse response of the MC-dc/SFQ converter. We employed on-chip pulse generators to evaluate pulse response of the MC-dc/SFQ converter for various pulses. The MC-dc/SFQ converter correctly operated for the pulse current with the amplitude of 52,$mu$A and the width of 179,ps. In addition, we examined influence of the pulse amplitude and width to operation of the MC-dc/SFQ converter by numerical simulation. The simulation results indicated that the MC-dc/SFQ converter had wide operation margins for pulse current with amplitudes of 30--60,$mu$A irrespective of the pulse widths.

Recently, Gan and Luo have proposed a direction-of-arrival estimation method for uncorrelated and coherent signals in the presence of multipath propagation [3]. In their method, uncorrelated and coherent signals are distinguished by rotational invariance techniques and the property of the moduli of eigenvalues. However, due to the limitation of finite number of sensors, the pseudo-inverse matrix derived in this method is an approximate one. When the number of sensors is small, the approximation error is large, which adversely affects the property of the moduli of eigenvalues. Consequently, the method in [3] performs poorly in identifying uncorrelated signals under such circumstance. Moreover, in cases of small number of snapshots and low signal to noise ratio, the performance of their method is poor as well. Therefore, in this letter we first study the approximation in [3] and then propose an improved method that performs better in distinguishing between uncorrelated signals and coherent signals and in the aforementioned two cases. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.

This letter investigates the consensus problem for an undirected network of high-order integrators with an arbitrarily large communication delay. A consensus protocol with the low gain parameter that can eliminate an effect of time delay on the consensus problem is proposed newly. Moreover, it is proved that under some sufficient conditions, it can solve the consensus problem in the presence of an arbitrarily large communication delay. A simulation example is presented to verify the validness of the proposed design.

In a proxy re-signatures (PRS) scheme, a semi-trusted proxy is given some information which allows it to translate a user i's signature on a message m into another user j's signature on the same message m. However, the proxy cannot, on it own, compute signatures for either i or j. This notion introduced by Blaze et a. at EUROCRYPT 1998, and then revisited by Ateniese and Hohenberger at CCS 2005. The existence of multi-use unidirectional PRS scheme is an open problem left by AH05. Whereafter, at CCS 2008, Libert and Vergnaud constructed the first multi-use unidirectional PRS scheme. However, there is a major drawback in the LV08 scheme that the size of the signatures is linear in the number of translations. Hence, Libert and Vergnaud said that a more challenging task would be to find out implementations of such primitives where the size of signatures and the verification cost do not grow linearly with the number of translations. In this work we resolve this task by constructing a such PRS scheme in the standard model by using indistinguishability obfuscation. A shortcoming of our construction is that the security is selective but not full.

It is well-known that program readability is important for maintenance tasks. Method names are important identifiers for program readability because they are used for understanding the behavior of methods without reading a part of the program. Although developers can create a method name by arbitrarily choosing a verb and objects, the names are expected to represent the behavior consistently. However, it is not easy for developers to choose verbs and objects consistently since each developer may have a different notion of a suitable lexicon for method names. In this paper, we propose a technique to recommend candidate verbs for a method name so that developers can use various verbs consistently. We recommend candidate verbs likely to be used as a part of a method name, using association rules extracted from existing methods. To evaluate our technique, we have extracted rules from 445 open source projects written in Java and confirmed the accuracy of our approach by applying the extracted rules to several open source applications. As a result, we found that 84.9% of the considered methods in four projects are recommended the existing verb. Moreover, we found that 73.2% of the actual renamed methods in six projects are recommended the correct verb.

In this letter, we give a trace representation of binary Jacobi sequences with period pq over an extension field of the odd prime field Fr. Our method is based on the use of a pqth root of unity over the extension field, and the representation of the Jacobi sequences by corresponding indicator functions and quadratic characters of two primes p and q.

Based on the work by Helleseth [1], for an odd prime p and an even integer n=2m, the cross-correlation values between two decimated m-sequences by the decimation factors 2 and 4pn/2-2 are derived. Their cross-correlation function is at most 4-valued, that is, $igg {rac{-1 pm p^{n/2}}{2}, rac{-1 + 3p^{n/2}}{2}, rac{-1 + 5p^{n/2}}{2} igg }$. From this result, for pm ≠ 2 mod 3, a new sequence family with family size 4N and the maximum correlation magnitude upper bounded by $rac{-1 + 5p^{n/2}}{2} simeq rac{5}{sqrt{2}}sqrt{N}$ is constructed, where $N = rac{p^n-1}{2}$ is the period of sequences in the family.

The minimum biclique cover problem is known to be NP-hard for general bipartite graphs. It can be solved in polynomial time for C4-free bipartite graphs, bipartite distance hereditary graphs and bipartite domino-free graphs. In this paper, we define the modified Galois lattice Gm(B) for a bipartite graph B and introduce the redundant parameter R(B). We show that R(B)=0 if and only if B is domino-free. Furthermore, for an input graph such that R(B)=1, we show that the minimum biclique cover problem can be solved in polynomial time.

In mobile ad hoc networks, a malicious node can respond with a faked route reply (RREP) message to a source that explores a route in order to make the source establish a false route leading to the malicious node. Then, the malicious node can absorb all transmitted packets like a black hole. This paper proposes a totally secure defense against the black hole attack with low control overhead and high reliability. The proposed approach, named a bullet-proof verification (BPV) method, consists of a detection phase, in which a node detects a suspicious node by analyzing the data routing information of its neighbors and a verification phase, in which a node initiates the verification of a suspicious node conditionally only if it receives RREP from the suspicious node. The crux of this approach lies in using an encrypted verification message that goes straight to the destination through the path that may include some malicious nodes and also in using both destination sequence number and hop distance for verification. In addition, a distributed watchdog mechanism is employed to track down any malicious nodes. Simulation results show that the BPV approach reduces control overhead significantly and defends against black hole attack reliably.

The indoor fingerprinting localization technology has received more attention in recent years due to the increasing demand of the indoor location based services (LBSs). However, a high quality of the LBS requires a positioning solution with high accuracy and low computational complexity. The particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique, which emulates the social behavior of a flock of birds to search for the optimal solution of a special problem, can provide attractive performance in terms of accuracy, computational efficiency and convergence rate. In this paper, we adopt the PSO algorithm to estimate the location information. First, our system establishes a Bayesian-rule based objective function. It then applies PSO to identify the optimal solution. We also propose a hybrid access point (AP) selection method to improve the accuracy, and analyze the effects of the number and the initial positions of particles on the localization performance. In order to mitigate the estimation error, we use the Kalman Filter to update the initial estimated location via the PSO algorithm to track the trail of the mobile user. Our analysis indicates that our method can reduce the computational complexity and improve the real-time performance. Numerous experiments also demonstrate that our proposed localization and tracking system achieve higher localization accuracy than existing systems.

Computing an invariant of a graph such as treewidth and pathwidth is one of the fundamental problems in graph algorithms. In general, determining the pathwidth of a graph is NP-hard. In this paper, we propose several reduction methods for decreasing the instance size without changing the pathwidth, and implemented the methods together with an exact algorithm for computing pathwidth of graphs. Our experimental results show that the number of vertices in all chemical graphs in NCI database decreases by our reduction methods by 53.81% in average.

During the investment process for enhancing the level of IT security, organizations typically rely on two kinds of security countermeasures, i.e., proactive security countermeasures (PSCs) and reactive security countermeasures (RSCs). The PSCs are known to prevent security incidents before their occurrence, while the RSCs identify security incidents and recover the damaged hardware and software during or after their occurrence. Some researchers studied the effect of the integration of PSCs and RSCs, and showed that the integration can control unwanted incidents better than a single type of security countermeasure. However, the studies were made mostly in a qualitative manner, not in a quantitative manner. In this paper, we focus on deriving a quantitative model that analyzes the influence of different conditions on the efficiency of the integrated security countermeasures. Using the proposed model, we analyze for the first time how vulnerability and the potential exploits resulting from such vulnerability can affect the efficiency of the integrated security countermeasures; furthermore, we analytically verify that as the efficiency of PSCs increases, the burden of RSCs decreases, and vice versa. Also, we describe how to select possibly optimal configurations of the integrated security countermeasures.

In this paper, we explore possibilities and difficulties to prove super-quadratic formula size lower bounds from the following aspects. First, we consider recursive Boolean functions and prove their general formula size upper bounds. We also discuss recursive Boolean functions based on exact 2-bit functions. We show that their formula complexity are at least Ω(n2). Hence they can be candidate Boolean functions to prove super-quadratic formula size lower bounds. Next, we consider the reason of the difficulty of resolving the formula complexity of the majority function in contrast with the parity function. In particular, we discuss the structure of an optimal protocol partition for the Karchmer-Wigderson communication game.

This paper presents a filtering method for efficient face image retrieval over large volume of face databases. The proposed method employs a new face image descriptor, called a cell-orientation vector (COV). It has a simple form: a 72-dimensional vector of integers from 0 to 8. Despite of its simplicity, it achieves high accuracy and efficiency. Our experimental results show that the proposed method based on COVs provides better performance than a recent approach based on identity-based quantization in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.