The circuit switching device by the electrical contact needs the high reliability and long lifetime. The very important factor for the high reliability, long lifetime and electromagnetic noise of the electrical contact is to suppress the duration and electromagnetic noise of arc discharge. Usually, the suppression of arc duration method is applying the external magnetic field. But, this method was not able to suppress the metallic arc duration and increased the voltage fluctuation at arc duration. Therefore, the new method for suppressing the duration and noise for electrical contact is expected. In this paper, a new method for suppressing duration and EM noise of arc discharge by applying housing pressure is proposed. To investigate the availability of proposed method, the measurement and some considerations on arc duration, voltage-fluctuation and current noise up to GHz frequency band generated by breaking contact in the applied pressure relay housing are reported. Firstly, voltage waveform and duration of the arc are measured. The effects of the pressure in the relay housing on the duration of the metallic and gaseous phase arcs are discussed. Secondary, voltage fluctuation, the spectrogram of contact voltage and current noise up to GHz frequency band are discussed. In the results, the proposed method with applying pressure makes shorter both durations of metallic and gaseous phases. The shorter duration of metallic phase is an advantage of the proposed method beyond the applying external magnetic field. As the housing pressure is increase, the voltage fluctuation and current noise becomes smalls. The proposed method can suppress the voltage fluctuation as well as arc duration. Consequently, the proposed method is on of the good solution to suppress the duration and electromagnetic noise of the arc discharge from electrical contact and result of this study indicates the basic considerations necessary to ensure good lifetime and EMC designs for electrical contacts.

An injection locked coupled push-push 3-oscillators array using unilateral coupling circuits is proposed. The circuit consists of unit oscillators and coupling circuits. For the unit oscillator, a dual-band push-push oscillator which generates the fundamental signal (f0) and the second harmonic signal (2f0) is adopted. The output signal of the oscillator array is the second harmonic signal. The fundamental signal is used for the injection signal to synchronize oscillators. These adjoining unit oscillators are connected by the coupling circuits. The coupling circuit is composed of a buffer amplifier and a phase shifter. Due to the advantage of the push-push oscillator, the phase shift between the adjoining oscillators is twice as large as that of the phase shift in the coupling circuit. The oscillator array is designed in Ku-band. Three push-push oscillators are arrayed and include two coupling circuits which are designed and fabricated. The phase shift of 190.0 degrees between the adjoining unit oscillators is demonstrated.

Question and Answering (Q&A) sites are recently gaining popularity on the Web. People using such sites are like a community-anyone can ask, anyone can answer, and everyone can share, since all of the questions and answers are public and searchable immediately. This mechanism can reduce the time and effort to find the most relevant answer. Unfortunately, the users suffer from answer quality problem due to several reasons including limited knowledge about the question domain, bad intentions (e.g. spam, making fun of others), limited time to prepare good answers, etc. In order to identify the credible users to help people find relevant answer, in this paper, we propose a ranking algorithm, InfluenceRank, which is basis of analyzing relationship in terms of users' activities and their mutual trusts. Our experimental studies show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the baseline algorithms.

Decision tree-based clustering and parameter estimation are essential steps in the training part of an HMM-based speech synthesis system. These two steps are usually performed based on the maximum likelihood (ML) criterion. However, one of the drawbacks of the ML criterion is that it is sensitive to outliers which usually result in quality degradation of the synthesized speech. In this letter, we propose an approach to detect and remove outliers for HMM-based speech synthesis. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can improve the synthetic speech, particularly when the available training speech database is insufficient.

A low-complexity method for angle estimation in Multiple-input multiple-output radar (MIMO) radar is presented. In this approach, the signal subspace can be spanned by the orthogonal vectors which are obtained by Multi-stage Wiener Filter (MSWF), then the ESPRIT method can be used to estimate direction of departures (DODs) and direction of arrivals (DOAs). Compared with the conventional ESPRIT algorithm, the proposed method does not involve estimation of the covariance matrix and its eigen-decomposition, which alleviates remarkably the computational complexity. Moreover, the proposed method achieves the similar angle estimation performance. Simulation results are presented to verify the efficiency of the proposed method.

In this paper, we propose a soft-decoding near-ML MIMO demodulation scheme that achieves near optimal performance with fixed and low complexity. Exploiting the regular structure of bit-to-symbol mapping, the proposed scheme performs hard demodulation to find the first candidate symbol for each stream followed by selection of nearby candidate points such that at least one candidate exists for the computation of likelihood information of bit 0 and 1 without intermediate calculation of the Euclidean distance. This demodulation scheme enables an improvement in performance by guaranteeing the existence of candidates and a significant reduction in the number of distance calculations which is a major complexity burden. The performance is evaluated by computer simulation, and computational complexity is also assessed in terms of the number of complex multiplication.

Tin (Sn) contacts are widely applied to connector contacts. Surfaces of plated tin layer are covered with an oxide film that results in high contact resistance. However, it is possible to obtain low contact resistance by using high contact load. Current downsizing trends often make it difficult to obtain high contact loads. Therefore, it is important to conduct basic studies of the contacts resistance characteristics under low contact load conditions. In this study, relationships between contact resistance and the changes of contact traces were examined. When a platinum (Pt) hemisphere contacted to tin plated flat coupon, it was found that the hemisphere surface sank into the softer tin plated flat surface during loading resulting in a piling up tin crystal grains along the periphery of the contact trace. During this process, sudden decrease in contact resistance was observed. To clarify the phenomenon, morphology changes of contact traces were observed by AFM, SEM and EBSD. FEM analysis was also used to analyze the mechanical stress distribution in the tin plated layer. Due to the peculiar distribution of stress, the crystal grains are separated and push out the contact area. This phenomenon is very different from commonly observed decrease in contact resistance due to elastic and plastic deformation inducing mechanical fracture of the surface oxide film.

This letter proposes a reuse method of unit test cases, which characterize internal behaviors of a called function, for enhancing capability of automatic generation of test cases. Existing test case generation tools have limits in finding solutions to the deep call structure of the source code. In our approach, the complex call structure is simplified by reusing unit test cases of called functions. As unit test cases represent the characteristics of the called function, the internal behaviors of called functions are replaced by the test cases. This approach can be applicable to existing test tools for simplifying the process of generation and enhancing their capabilities.

There exists a considerable number of node placement models and algorithms for simulation of wireless multihop networks. However, the topologies created with the existing algorithms do not have properties of real networks. We have developed NPART (Node Placement Algorithm for Realistic Topologies) in order to resolve this fundamental issue in simulation methodology. We compare topologies generated by NPART with open wireless multihop network in Berlin. The NPART generated topologies have almost identical node degree distribution, number of cut-edges and vertices as the real network. Unlike them, topologies generated with the common node placement models have their own characteristics which are considerably different both from NPART and from reality. NPART algorithm has been developed into a tool. We propose a method and present a tool for integration of NPART with various realistic node mobility algorithms and tools, such as Citymob [1] and MOVE [2]. This integrated tool allows easy and time-efficient generation of highly complex, realistic simulation scenarios. We use the tool to evaluate effects of integration between existing open community wireless multi-hop networks and vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). The evaluation shows that despite partial coverage and peculiar topological properties of open networks, they offer high levels of performance and network availability to the mobile end users, virtually identical to performance and availability of planned, dedicatedly deployed networks. Our results indicate that the integration of these networks may bring considerable benefits to all parties involved.

Network-on-chip (NoC) architectures have emerged as a promising solution to the lack of scalability in multi-processor systems-on-chips (MPSoCs). With the explosive growth in the usage of multimedia applications, it is expected that NoC serves as a multimedia server supporting multi-class services. In this paper, we propose a configuration algorithm for a hybrid bus-NoC architecture together with simulation results. Our target architecture is a hybrid bus-NoC architecture, called busmesh NoC, which is a generalized version of a hybrid NoC with local buses. In our BMNoC configuration algorithm, cores which have a heavy communication volume between them are mapped in a cluster node (CN) and connected by a local bus. CNs can have communication with each other via edge switches (ESes) and mesh routers (MRs). With this hierarchical communication network, our proposed algorithm can improve the latency as compared with conventional methods. Several realistic applications applied to our algorithm illustrate the better performance than earlier studies and feasibility of our proposed algorithm.

This study proposes an improved per-survivor-processing (PSP) scheme to tackle the phase error issue in the convolutionally coded OFDM systems. The proposed approach takes advantage of the trellis structure of the convolutional codes to compensate the symbol-time-offset (STO) caused phase error in frequency domain. Unlike the traditional PSP scheme which simply estimates the phase error by using a state-based horizontal process, the proposed approach develops an extra state-wise vertical process which selects the most likely phase estimate as the survival phase in each trellis stage and then accordingly align the phase of all states to this survival phase before moving to next trellis stage of the PSP scheme. With the vertical process, the resultant phase estimate is more reliable than that of the conventional PSP scheme and hence improve the accuracy in data decoding. Computer simulations confirm the validity of the proposed approach.

Out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words create serious problems for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Not only are they miss-recognized as in-vocabulary (IV) words with similar phonetics, but the error also causes further errors in nearby words. Language models (LMs) for most open vocabulary ASR systems treat OOV words as a single entity, ignoring the linguistic information. In this paper we present a class-based n-gram LM that is able to deal with OOV words by treating each of them individually without retraining all the LM parameters. OOV words are assigned to IV classes consisting of similar semantic meanings for IV words. The World Wide Web is used to acquire additional data for finding the relation between the OOV and IV words. An evaluation based on adjusted perplexity and word-error-rate was carried out on the Wall Street Journal corpus. The result suggests the preference of the use of multiple classes for OOV words, instead of one unknown class.

We present attacks on the generalized Feistel schemes, where each round function consists of a subkey XOR, S-boxes, and then a linear transformation (i.e. a Substitution-Permutation (SP) round function). Our techniques are based on rebound attacks. We assume that the S-boxes have a good differential property and the linear transformation has an optimal branch number. Under this assumption, we firstly describe known-key distinguishers on the type-1, -2, and -3 generalized Feistel schemes up to 21, 13 and 8 rounds, respectively. Then, we use the distinguishers to make several attacks on hash functions where Merkle-Damgård domain extender is used and the compression function is constructed with Matyas-Meyer-Oseas or Miyaguchi-Preneel hash modes from generalized Feistel schemes. Collision attacks are made for 11 rounds of type-1 Feistel scheme. Near collision attacks are made for 13 rounds of type-1 Feistel scheme and 9 rounds of type-2 Feistel scheme. Half collision attacks are made for 15 rounds of type-1 Feistel scheme, 9 rounds of type-2 Feistel scheme, and 5 rounds of type-3 Feistel scheme.

In this paper, the correspondence between the weighted line graph and the Mason signal flow graph (MSFG) has been established, which gives an interpretation of a convolutional network code (CNC) over a cyclic network from a different perspective. Furthermore, by virtue of Mason theorem, we present two new equivalent conditions to evaluate whether the global encoding kernels (GEKs) can be uniquely determined by the given complete set of local encoding kernels (LEKs) in a CNC over a cyclic network. These two new equivalent conditions turn out to be more intuitive. Moreover, we give an alternative simple proof of an existing result.

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is widely used for music transcription because of its efficiency. However, the conventional NMF-based music transcription algorithm often causes harmonic confusion errors or time split-up errors, because the NMF decomposes the time-frequency data according to the activated frequency in its time. To solve these problems, we proposed an NMF with temporal continuity and harmonicity constraints. The temporal continuity constraint prevented the time split-up of the continuous time components, and the harmonicity constraint helped to bind the fundamental with harmonic frequencies by reducing the additional octave errors. The transcription performance of the proposed algorithm was compared with that of the conventional algorithms, which showed that the proposed method helped to reduce additional false errors and increased the overall transcription performance.

Orthogonal space-time block code (OSTBC) can achieve full diversity with a simple MLD, but OSTBC only achieves 3/4 of the maximum rate if more than two transmit antennas are used. To solve this problem, a quasi-orthogonal STBC (QOSTBC) scheme has been proposed. Even though a QOSTBC scheme can achieve the full rate, there are interference terms resulting from neighboring signals during detection. The existing QOSTBC using the pairs of transmitted symbols can be detected with two parallel MLD. Therefore, MLD based QOSTBC has higher complexity than OSTBC. To reduce the detection complexity, in this paper, we propose the heterogeneous constellation based QOSTBC for improving the detection property of QRD-MLD with maintaining a simple decoding structure.

In this paper, we propose a high accuracy motion estimation method based on the spatio-temporal gradient method using high frame-rate images. In the method, we adopt spatial gradients with low estimated errors by the previous motion vectors. In addition, we evaluate the proposed method and confirm the effectiveness. Finally, we apply the method to super-resolution as an application of the proposed method.

This paper presents a novel CMOS readout circuit for satellite infrared time delay and integration (TDI) arrays. An integrate-while-read method is adopted, and a dead-pixel-elimination circuit for solving a critical problem of the TDI scheme is integrated within a chip. In addition, an adaptive charge capacity control method is proposed to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for low-temperature targets. The readout circuit was fabricated with a 0.35-µm CMOS process for a 5004 mid-wavelength infrared (MWIR) HgCdTe detector array. Using the circuit, a 90% background-limited infrared photodetection (BLIP) is satisfied over a wide input range (∼200–330 K), and the SNR is improved by 11 dB for the target temperature of 200 K.

We investigate a sparsely encoded Hopfield model with unit replacement by using a statistical mechanical method called self-consistent signal-to-noise analysis. We theoretically obtain a relation between the storage capacity and the number of replacement units for each sparseness a. Moreover, we compare the unit replacement model with the forgetting model in terms of the network storage capacity. The results show that the unit replacement model has a finite value of the optimal sparseness on an open interval 0 (1/2 coding) < a < 1 (the limit of sparseness) to maximize the storage capacity for a large number of replacement units, although the forgetting model does not.