This paper proposes the mesh-topology based wireless-powered communication network (MT-WPCN), which consists of a hybrid-access point (H-AP) and nodes. The H-AP broadcasts energy to all nodes by wireless, and the nodes harvest the energy and then communicate with other nodes including the H-AP. For the communication in the MT-WPCN, we propose the harvest-then-transceive protocol to ensure that the nodes can harvest energy from the H-AP and transmit information selectively to the H-AP or other nodes, which is not supported in most protocols proposed for the conventional WPCN. In the proposed protocol, we consider that the energy harvesting can be interrupted at nodes, since the nodes cannot harvest energy during transmission or reception. We also consider that the harvested energy is consumed by the reception of information from other nodes. In addition, the energy reservation model is required to guarantee the QoS, which reserves the infimum energy to receive information reliably by the transmission power control. Under these considerations, first, we design the half harvest-then-transceive protocol, which indicates that a node transmits information only to other nodes which do not transmit information yet, for investing the effect of the energy harvesting interruption. Secondly, we also design the full harvest-then-transceive protocol for the information exchange among nodes and compatibility with the conventional star-topology based WPCN, which indicates that a node can transmit information to any network unit, i.e., the H-AP and all nodes. We study the sum-throughput maximization in the MT-WPCN based on the half and full harvest-then-transceive protocols, respectively. Furthermore, the amount of harvested energy is analytically compared according to the energy harvesting interruption in the protocols. Simulation results show that the proposed MT-WPCN outperforms the conventional star-topology based WPCN in terms of the sum-throughput maximization, when wireless information transmission among nodes occurs frequently.

In this work, a multiple source separation method with joint sparse and non-sparse components recovery is proposed by using dual similarity determination. Specifically, a dual similarity coefficient is designed based on normalized cross-correlation and Jaccard coefficients, and its reasonability is validated via a statistical analysis on a quantitative effective measure. Thereafter, by regarding the sparse components as a guide, the non-sparse components are recovered using the dual similarity coefficient. Eventually, a separated signal is obtained by a synthesis of the sparse and non-sparse components. Experimental results demonstrate the separation quality of the proposed method outperforms some existing BSS methods including sparse components separation based methods, independent components analysis based methods and soft threshold based methods.

Existing remote collaboration systems are not suitable for a collaboration style where distributed users touch work tools at the same time, especially in demanding use cases or in severe network situations. To cover a wider range of use cases, we propose a novel concept of a remote collaboration platform that enables the users to share currently-used work tools with a high quality A/V transmission module, while maintaining the advantages of web-based systems. It also provides functions to deal with long transmission delay using relay servers, packet transmission instability using visual feedback of audio delivery and limited bandwidth using dynamic allocation of video bitrate. We implemented the platform and conducted evaluation tests. The results show the feasibility of the proposed concept and its tolerance to network constraints, which indicates that the proposed platform can construct unprecedented collaboration systems.

In this paper, we propose a new enhancement method for color images. In color image processing, hue preserving is required. The proposed method is performed into HSI color space whose gamut is same as RGB color space. The differential gray-level histogram equalization (DHE) is effective for gray scale images. The proposed method is an extension version of the DHE for color images, and furthermore, the enhancement degree is variable by introducing two parameters. Since our processing method is applied to not only intensity but also saturation, the contrast and the colorfulness of the output image can be varied. It is an important issue how to determine the two parameters. Thus, we give the guideline for how to decide the two parameters. By using the guideline, users can easily obtain their own enhancement images.

Image boundary detection or image segmentation is an important step in image analysis. However, choosing appropriate parameters for boundary detection algorithms is necessary to achieve good boundary detection results. Image boundary detection fusion with unsupervised parameters can output a final consensus boundary, which is generally better than using unsupervised or supervised image boundary detection algorithms. In this study, we theoretically examine why image boundary detection fusion can work well and we propose a mixture model for image boundary detection fusion (MMIBDF) to achieve good consensus segmentation in an unsupervised manner. All of the segmentation algorithms are treated as new features and the segmentation results obtained by the algorithms are the values of the new features. The MMIBDF is designed to sample the boundary according to a discrete distribution. We present an inference method for MMIBDF and describe the corresponding algorithm in detail. Extensive empirical results demonstrate that MMIBDF significantly outperforms other image boundary detection fusion algorithms and the base image boundary detection algorithms according to most performance indices.

In mobile and wireless networks, controlling data delivery latency is one of open problems due to the stochastic nature of wireless channels, which are inherently unreliable. This paper explores how the current best-effort throughput-oriented wireless services might evolve into latency-sensitive enablers of new mobile applications such as remote three-dimensional (3D) graphical rendering for interactive virtual/augmented-reality overlay. Assuming that the signal propagation delay and achievable throughput meet the standard latency requirements of the user application, we examine the idea of trading excess/federated bandwidth for the elimination of non-negligible delay of data re-ordering, caused by temporal transmission failures and buffer overflows. The general system design is based on (i) spatially diverse data delivery over multiple paths with uncorrelated outage likelihoods; and (ii) forward packet-loss protection (FPP), creating encoding redundancy for proactive recovery of intolerably delayed data without end-to-end retransmissions. Analysis and evaluation are based on traces of real life traffic, which is measured in live carrier-grade long term evolution (LTE) networks and campus WiFi networks, due to no such system/environment yet to verify the importance of spatial diversity and encoding redundancy. Analysis and evaluation reveal the seriousness of the latency problem and that the proposed FPP with spatial diversity and encoding redundancy can minimize the delay of re-ordering. Moreover, a novel FPP effectiveness coefficient is proposed to explicitly represent the effectiveness of EPP implementation.

Creating an ontology from multidisciplinary knowledge is a challenge because it needs a number of various domain experts to collaborate in knowledge construction and verify the semantic meanings of the cross-domain concepts. Confusions and misinterpretations of concepts during knowledge creation are usually caused by having different perspectives and different business goals from different domain experts. In this paper, we propose a community-driven ontology-based application management (CD-OAM) framework that provides a collaborative environment with supporting features to enable collaborative knowledge creation. It can also reduce confusions and misinterpretations among domain stakeholders during knowledge construction process. We selected one of the multidisciplinary domains, which is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for our scenario-based knowledge construction. Constructing the LCA knowledge requires many concepts from various fields including environment protection, economic development, social development, etc. The output of this collaborative knowledge construction is called MLCA (multidisciplinary LCA) ontology. Based on our scenario-based experiment, it shows that CD-OAM framework can support the collaborative activities for MLCA knowledge construction and also reduce confusions and misinterpretations of cross-domain concepts that usually presents in general approach.

Creating new content based on existing original work is becoming popular especially among amateur creators. Such new content is called derivative work and can be transformed into the next new derivative work. Such derivative work creation is called “N-th order derivative creation.” Although derivative creation is popular, the reason an individual derivative work was created is not observable. To infer the factors that trigger derivative work creation, we have proposed a model that incorporates three factors: (1) original work's attractiveness, (2) original work's popularity, and (3) derivative work's popularity. Based on this model, in this paper, we describe a public web service for browsing derivation factors called Songrium Derivation Factor Analysis. Our service is implemented by applying our model to original works and derivative works uploaded to a video sharing service. Songrium Derivation Factor Analysis provides various visualization functions: Original Works Map, Derivation Tree, Popularity Influence Transition Graph, Creator Distribution Map, and Creator Profile. By displaying such information when users browse and watch videos, we aim to enable them to find new content and understand the N-th order derivative creation activity at a deeper level.

Spatio-temporal dependent data, such as weather observation data, are data of which the attribute values depend on both time and space. Typical methods for the visualization of such data include plotting the attribute values at each point in time on a map and displaying series of the maps in chronological order with animation, or displaying them by juxtaposing horizontally or vertically. However, these methods are problematic in that they compel readers interested in grasping the spatial changes of the attribute values to memorize the representations on the maps. The problem is exacerbated by considering that the longer the time-period covered by the data, the higher the cognitive load. In order to solve these problems, the authors propose a visualization method capable of overlaying the representations of multiple instantaneous values on a single static map. This paper explains the design of the proposed method and reports two experiments conducted by the authors to investigate the usefulness of the method. The experimental results show that the proposed method is useful in terms of the speed and accuracy with which it reads the spatial changes and its ability to present data with long time series efficiently.

With the recent explosion of geographic data generated by smartphones, sensors, and satellites, a data storage that can handle the massive volume of data and support high-computational spatial queries is becoming essential. Although key-value stores efficiently handle large-scale data, they are not equipped with effective functions for supporting geographic data. To solve this problem, in this paper, we present G-HBase, a high-performance geographical database based on HBase, a standard key-value store. To index geographic data, we first use Geohash as the rowkey in HBase. Then, we present a novel partitioning method, namely binary Geohash rectangle partitioning, to support spatial queries. Our extensive experiments on real datasets have demonstrated an improved performance with k nearest neighbors and range query in G-HBase when compared with SpatialHadoop, a state-of-the-art framework with native support for spatial data. We also observed that performance of spatial join in G-HBase is on par with SpatialHadoop and outperforms SJMR algorithm in HBase.

In this study, we propose a deep neural generative model for predicting daily stock price movements given news articles. Approaches involving conventional technical analysis have been investigated to identify certain patterns in past price movements, which in turn helps to predict future price movements. However, the financial market is highly sensitive to specific events, including corporate buyouts, product releases, and the like. Therefore, recent research has focused on modeling relationships between these events that appear in the news articles and future price movements; however, a very large number of news articles are published daily, each article containing rich information, which results in overfitting to past price movements used for parameter adjustment. Given the above, we propose a model based on a generative model of news articles that includes price movement as a condition, thereby avoiding excessive overfitting thanks to the nature of the generative model. We evaluate our proposed model using historical price movements of Nikkei 225 and Standard & Poor's 500 Stock Index, confirming that our model predicts future price movements better than such conventional classifiers as support vector machines and multilayer perceptrons. Further, our proposed model extracts significant words from news articles that are directly related to future stock price movements.

Online chat systems, e.g.., Twitter and Slack, have been used in academic conferences or study meetings as a means of instant discussion and sharing related information alongside a real presentation. We propose a system for activating online discussion by providing a bot that suggests webpages related to current timeline of the discussion. Our system generates keyword vectors according to discussion timeline, searches best related webpages from several web sites, and timely provides these pages to the discussion timeline. This paper describes deployments of our system in two types of meetings: lightning talk format meetings and group meetings; and daily exchanges using online chat system. As a result, we could not find good enough reactions to the bot's postings from meeting participants at the lightning talk format meetings, but we could observe more reactions and progress of discussion caused by the bot's postings at the relaxed meetings and daily exchanges among group members.

In this paper, a new array geometry is proposed which is capable of performing underdetermined Direction-Of-Arrival (DOA) estimation for the circular array configuration. DOA estimation is a classical problem and one of the most important techniques in array signal processing as it has applications in wireless and mobile communications, acoustics, and seismic sensing. We consider the problem of estimating DOAs in the case when we have more sources than the number of physical sensors where the resolution must be maintained. The proposed array geometry called Nested Sparse Circular Array (NSCA) is an extension of the two level nested linear array obtained by nesting two sub-circular arrays and one element is placed at the origin. In order to extend the array aperture, a Khatri-Rao (KR) approach is applied to the proposed NSCA which yields the virtual array structure. To utilize the increase in the degrees of freedom (DOFs) that this new array provides, a subspace based approach (MUSIC) for DOA estimation and l1-based optimization approach is extended to estimate DOAs using NSCA. Simulations show that better performance for underdetermined DOA estimation is achieved using the proposed array geometry.

This paper addresses the issue of modeling the discourse nature of lyrics and presented the first study aiming at capturing the two common discourse-related notions: storylines and themes. We assume that a storyline is a chain of transitions over topics of segments and a song has at least one entire theme. We then hypothesize that transitions over topics of lyric segments can be captured by a probabilistic topic model which incorporates a distribution over transitions of latent topics and that such a distribution of topic transitions is affected by the theme of lyrics. Aiming to test those hypotheses, this study conducts experiments on the word prediction and segment order prediction tasks exploiting a large-scale corpus of popular music lyrics for both English and Japanese (around 100 thousand songs). The findings we gained from these experiments can be summarized into two respects. First, the models with topic transitions significantly outperformed the model without topic transitions in word prediction. This result indicates that typical storylines included in our lyrics datasets were effectively captured as a probabilistic distribution of transitions over latent topics of segments. Second, the model incorporating a latent theme variable on top of topic transitions outperformed the models without such variables in both word prediction and segment order prediction. From this result, we can conclude that considering the notion of theme does contribute to the modeling of storylines of lyrics.

This paper presents a supervised method to classify a document at the sub-sentence level. Traditionally, sentiment analysis often classifies sentence polarity based on word features, syllable features, or N-gram features. A sentence, as a whole, may contain several phrases and words which carry their own specific sentiment. However, classifying a sentence based on phrases and words can sometimes be incoherent because they are ungrammatically formed. In order to overcome this problem, we need to arrange words and phrase in a dependency form to capture their semantic scope of sentiment. Thus, we transform a sentence into a dependency tree structure. A dependency tree is composed of subtrees, and each subtree allocates words and syllables in a grammatical order. Moreover, a sentence dependency tree structure can mitigate word sense ambiguity or solve the inherent polysemy of words by determining their word sense. In our experiment, we provide the details of the proposed subtree polarity classification for sub-opinion analysis. To conclude our discussion, we also elaborate on the effectiveness of the analysis result.

This paper presents a 27.5-29.6GHz fractional-N frequency synthesizer using reference and frequency doublers to achieve low in-band and out-of-band phase-noise for 5G mobile communications. A consideration of the baseband carrier recovery circuit helps estimate phase noise requirement for high modulation scheme. The push-push amplifier and 28GHz balun help achieving differential signals with low out-of-band phase noise while consuming low power. A charge pump with gated offset as well as reference doubler help reducing PD noise resulting in low in-band phase noise while sampling loop filter helps reduce spurs. The proposed synthesizer has been implemented in 65nm CMOS technology achieving an in-band and out-of-band phase noise of -78dBc/Hz and -126dBc/Hz, respectively. It consumes only a total power of 33mW. The jitter-power figure-of-merit (FOM) is -231dB which is the highest among the state of the art >20GHz fractional-N PLLs using a low reference clock (<200MHz). The measured reference spurs are less than -80dBc.

In current large-scale IT systems, troubleshooting has become more complicated due to the diversification in the causes of failures, which has increased operational costs. Thus, clarifying the troubleshooting process also becomes important, though it is also time-consuming. We propose a method of automatically extracting a workflow, a graph indicating a troubleshooting process, using multiple trouble tickets. Our method extracts an operator's actions from free-format texts and aligns relative sentences between multiple trouble tickets. Our method uses a stochastic model to detect a resolution, a frequent action pattern that helps us understand how to solve a problem. We validated our method using real trouble-ticket data captured from a real network operation and showed that it can extract a workflow to identify the cause of a failure.

In this paper, a new generalized cyclotomy over Zpq is presented based on cyclotomy and Chinese remainder theorem, where p and q are different odd primes. Several new construction methods for binary sequence pairs of period pq with ideal two-level correlation are given by utilizing these generalized cyclotomic classes. All the binary sequence pairs from our constructions have both ideal out-of-phase correlation values -1 and optimum balance property.

To prepare antireflection coating (ARC) by wet process is important technology for low cost fabrication of solar cells. In this research, we consider the optical reflectance of a three layer stack structure of ARC films on the pyramidally textured single-crystalline silicon substrates. Each layer of the ARC films is deposited by a spin-coating method. The triple layers consist of SiO2, SiO2-TiO2 mixture, and TiO2 films from air to the silicon substrate in that order, and the refractive index is slightly increased from air to the substrate. Light reflection can be reduced further mainly due to graded index effect. The optimized three layer structure ARC shows that the reflectance is below 0.048 at the wavelength of 600 nm.

A novel and efficient coding method is proposed to improve person re-identification in the XQDA subspace. Traditional CRC (Collaborative Representation based Classification) conducts independent dictionary coding for each image and can not guarantee improved results over conventional euclidian distance. In this letter, however, a specific model is separately constructed for each probe image and each gallery image, i.e. in probe-galley pairwise manner. The proposed pairwise-specific CRC method can excavate extra discriminative information by enforcing a similarity item to pull similar sample-pairs closer. The approach has been evaluated against current methods on two benchmark datasets, achieving considerable improvement and outstanding performance.