Cooperative caching is a key technique to reduce rapid growing video-on-demand's traffic by aggregating multiple cache storages. Existing strategies periodically calculate a sub-optimal allocation of the content caches in the network. Although such technique could reduce the generated traffic between servers, it comes with the cost of a large computational overhead. This overhead will be the cause of preventing these caches from following the rapid change in the access pattern. In this paper, we propose a light-weight scheme for cooperative caching by grouping contents and servers with color tags. In our proposal, we associate servers and caches through a color tag, with the aim to increase the effective cache capacity by storing different contents among servers. In addition to the color tags, we propose a novel hybrid caching scheme that divides its storage area into colored LFU (Least Frequently Used) and no-color LRU (Least Recently Used) areas. The colored LFU area stores color-matching contents to increase cache hit rate and no-color LRU area follows rapid changes in access patterns by storing popular contents regardless of their tags. On the top of the proposed architecture, we also present a new routing algorithm that takes benefit of the color tags information to reduce the traffic by fetching cached contents from the nearest server. Evaluation results, using a backbone network topology, showed that our color-tag based caching scheme could achieve a performance close to the sub-optimal one obtained with a genetic algorithm calculation, with only a few seconds of computational overhead. Furthermore, the proposed hybrid caching could limit the degradation of hit rate from 13.9% in conventional non-colored LFU, to only 2.3%, which proves the capability of our scheme to follow rapid insertions of new popular contents. Finally, the color-based routing scheme could reduce the traffic by up to 31.9% when compared with the shortest-path routing.

As financial products have grown in complexity and level of risk compounding in recent years, investors have come to find it difficult to assess investment risk. Furthermore, companies managing mutual funds are increasingly expected to perform risk control and thus prevent assumption of unforeseen risk by investors. A related revision to the investment fund legal system in Japan led to establishing what is known as “the rule for investment diversification” in December 2014, without a clear discussion of its expected effects on market price formation having taken place. In this paper, we therefore used an artificial market to investigate its effects on price formation in financial markets where investors follow the rule at the time of a market crash that is caused by the collapse of an asset fundamental price. As results, we found the possibility that when the fundamental price of one asset collapses and its market price also collapses, some asset market prices also fall, whereas other asset market prices rise for a market in which investors follow the rule for investment diversification.

Multi-hypothesis prediction technique, which exploits inter-frame correlation efficiently, is widely used in block-based distributed compressive video sensing. To solve the problem of inaccurate prediction in multi-hypothesis prediction technique at a low sampling rate and enhance the reconstruction quality of non-key frames, we present a resample-based hybrid multi-hypothesis scheme for block-based distributed compressive video sensing. The innovations in this paper include: (1) multi-hypothesis reconstruction based on measurements reorganization (MR-MH) which integrates side information into the original measurements; (2) hybrid multi-hypothesis (H-MH) reconstruction which mixes multiple multi-hypothesis reconstructions adaptively by resampling each reconstruction. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art technique at the same low sampling rate.

In recommending to another individual an item that one loves, accuracy is important, however in most cases, focusing only on accuracy generates less satisfactory recommendations. Studies have repeatedly pointed out that aspects that go beyond accuracy — such as the diversity and novelty of the recommended items — are as important as accuracy in making a satisfactory recommendation. Despite their importance, there is no global consensus about definitions and evaluations regarding beyond-accuracy aspects, as such aspects closely relate to the subjective sensibility of user satisfaction. In addition, devising algorithms for this purpose is difficult, because algorithms concurrently pursue the aspects in trade-off relation (i.e., accuracy vs. novelty). In the aforementioned situation, for researchers initiating a study in this domain, it is important to obtain a systematically integrated view of the domain. This paper reports the results of a survey of about 70 studies published over the last 15 years, each of which addresses recommendations that consider beyond-accuracy aspects. From this survey, we identify diversity, novelty, and coverage as important aspects in achieving serendipity and popularity unbiasedness — factors that are important to user satisfaction and business profits, respectively. The five major groups of algorithms that tackle the beyond-accuracy aspects are multi-objective, modified collaborative filtering (CF), clustering, graph, and hybrid; we then classify and describe algorithms as per this typology. The off-line evaluation metrics and user studies carried out by the studies are also described. Based on the survey results, we assert that there is a lot of room for research in the domain. Especially, personalization and generalization are considered important issues that should be addressed in future research (e.g., automatic per-user-trade-off among the aspects, and properly establishing beyond-accuracy aspects for various types of applications or algorithms).

In this letter, we investigate the computation offloading problem in cloud based multi-robot systems, in which user weights, communication interference and cloud resource limitation are jointly considered. To minimize the system cost, two offloading selection and resource allocation algorithms are proposed. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithms both can greatly reduce the overall system cost, and the greedy selection based algorithm even achieves near-optimal performance.

In this paper, we propose a novel error recovery method for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) signal detection, which improves an estimate of transmitted signals by taking advantage of the sparsity and the discreteness of the error signal. We firstly formulate the error recovery problem as the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation and then relax the MAP estimation into a convex optimization problem, which reconstructs a discrete-valued sparse vector from its linear measurements. By using the restricted isometry property (RIP), we also provide a theoretical upper bound of the size of the reconstruction error with the optimization problem. Simulation results show that the proposed error recovery method has better bit error rate (BER) performance than that of the conventional error recovery method.

An improved beamformer, which uses joint estimation of the reconstructed interference-plus-noise (IPN) covariance matrix and array steering vector (ASV), is proposed. It can mitigate the problem of performance degradation in situations where the desired signal exists in the sample covariance matrix and the steering vector pointing has large errors. In the proposed method, the covariance matrix is reconstructed by weighted sum of the exterior products of the interferences' ASV and their individual power to reject the desired signal component, the coefficients of which can be accurately estimated by the compressed sensing (CS) and total least squares (TLS) techniques. Moreover, according to the theorem of sequential vector space projection, the actual ASV is estimated from an intersection of two subspaces by applying the alternating projection algorithm. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed beamformer, which is clearly better than the existing robust adaptive beamformers.

Coordinated checkpointing is a widely-used checkpoint/restart protocol for fault-tolerance in large-scale HPC systems. However, this protocol will involve massive amounts of I/O concentration, resulting in considerably high checkpoint overhead and high energy consumption. This paper focuses on speculative checkpointing, a CPR mechanism that allows for temporal distribution of checkpointings to avoid I/O concentration. We propose execution time and energy models for speculative checkpointing, and investigate energy-performance characteristics when speculative checkpointing is adopted in exascale systems. Using these models, we study the benefit of speculative checkpointing over coordinated checkpointing under various realistic scenarios for exascale HPC systems. We show that, compared to coordinated checkpointing, speculative checkpointing can achieve up to a 11% energy reduction at the cost of a relatively-small increase in the execution time. In addition, a significant energy-performance trade-off is expected when the system scale exceeds 1.2 million nodes.

A number of battery-driven sensor nodes are deployed to operate a wireless sensor network, and many routing protocols have been proposed to reduce energy consumption for data communications in the networks. We have proposed a new routing policy which employs a nearest-neighbor forwarding based on hop progress. Our proposed routing method has a topology parameter named forwarding angle to determine which node to connect with as a next-hop, and is compared with other existing policies to clarify the best topology for energy efficiency. In this paper, we also formulate the energy budget for networks with the routing policy by means of stochastic-geometric analysis on hop-count distributions for random planar networks. The formulation enables us to tell how much energy is required for all nodes in the network to forward sensed data in a pre-deployment phase. Simulation results show that the optimal topology varies according to node density in the network. Direct communication to the sink is superior for a small-sized network, and the multihop routing is more effective as the network becomes sparser. Evaluation results also demonstrate that our energy formulation can well approximate the energy budget, especially for small networks with a small forwarding angle. Discussion on the error with a large forwarding angle is then made with a geographical metric. It is finally clarified that our analytical expressions can obtain the optimal forwarding angle which yields the best energy efficiency for the routing policy when the network is moderately dense.

This paper presents a method to segment single- and multiple-touching characters in offline handwritten Japanese text recognition with practical speed. Distortions due to handwriting and a mix of complex Chinese characters with simple phonetic and alphanumeric characters leave optical handwritten text recognition (OHTR) for Japanese still far from perfection. Segmentation of characters, which touch neighbors on multiple points, is a serious unsolved problem. Therefore, we propose a method to segment them which is made in two steps: coarse segmentation and fine segmentation. The coarse segmentation employs vertical projection, stroke-width estimation while the fine segmentation takes a graph-based approach for thinned text images, which employs a new bridge finding process and Voronoi diagrams with two improvements. Unlike previous methods, it locates character centers and seeks segmentation candidates between them. It draws vertical lines explicitly at estimated character centers in order to prevent vertically unconnected components from being left behind in the bridge finding. Multiple candidates of separation are produced by removing touching points combinatorially. SVM is applied to discard improbable segmentation boundaries. Then, ambiguities are finally solved by the text recognition employing linguistic context and geometric context to recognize segmented characters. The results of our experiments show that the proposed method can segment not only single-touching characters but also multiple-touching characters, and each component in our proposed method contributes to the improvement of segmentation and recognition rates.

Various types of classifiers and feature extraction methods for acoustic scene classification have been recently proposed in the IEEE Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2016 Challenge Task 1. The results of the final evaluation, however, have shown that even top 10 ranked teams, showed extremely low accuracy performance in particular class pairs with similar sounds. Due to such sound classes being difficult to distinguish even by human ears, the conventional deep learning based feature extraction methods, as used by most DCASE participating teams, are considered facing performance limitations. To address the low performance problem in similar class pair cases, this letter proposes to employ a recurrent neural network (RNN) based source separation for each class prior to the classification step. Based on the fact that the system can effectively extract trained sound components using the RNN structure, the mid-layer of the RNN can be considered to capture discriminative information of the trained class. Therefore, this letter proposes to use this mid-layer information as novel discriminative features. The proposed feature shows an average classification rate improvement of 2.3% compared to the conventional method, which uses additional classifiers for the similar class pair issue.

This work presents a new approach which derives a learned data representation method through matrix factorization on the complex domain. In particular, we introduce an encoding matrix-a new representation of data-that satisfies the simplicial constraint of the projective basis matrix on the field of complex numbers. A complex optimization framework is provided. It employs the gradient descent method and computes the derivative of the cost function based on Wirtinger's calculus.

In this paper, we treat (k, L, n) ramp secret sharing schemes (SSSs) that can detect impersonation attacks and/or substitution attacks. First, we derive lower bounds on the sizes of the shares and random number used in encoding for given correlation levels, which are measured by the mutual information of shares. We also derive lower bounds on the success probabilities of attacks for given correlation levels and given sizes of shares. Next we propose a strong (k, L, n) ramp SSS against substitution attacks. As far as we know, the proposed scheme is the first strong (k, L, n) ramp SSSs that can detect substitution attacks of at most k-1 shares. Our scheme can be applied to a secret SL uniformly distributed over GF(pm)L, where p is a prime number with p≥L+2. We show that for a certain type of correlation levels, the proposed scheme can achieve the lower bounds on the sizes of the shares and random number, and can reduce the success probability of substitution attacks within nearly L times the lower bound when the number of forged shares is less than k. We also evaluate the success probability of impersonation attack for our schemes. In addition, we give some examples of insecure ramp SSSs to clarify why each component of our scheme is essential to realize the required security.

A new type of spatially coupled low density parity check (SCLDPC) code is proposed. This code has two benefits. (1) This code requires less number of iterations to correct the erasures occurring through the binary erasure channel in the waterfall region than that of the usual SCLDPC code. (2) This code has lower error floor than that of the usual SCLDPC code. Proposed code is constructed as a coupled chain of the underlying LDPC codes whose code lengths exponentially increase as the position where the codes exist is close to the middle of the chain. We call our code spatially “Mt. Fuji” coupled LDPC (SFCLDPC) code because the shape of the graph representing the code lengths of underlying LDPC codes at each position looks like Mt. Fuji. By this structure, when the proposed SFCLDPC code and the original SCLDPC code are constructed with the same code rate and the same code length, L (the number of the underlying LDPC codes) of the proposed SFCLDPC code becomes smaller and M (the code lengths of the underlying LDPC codes) of the proposed SFCLDPC code becomes larger than those of the SCLDPC code. These properties of L and M enables the above reduction of the number of iterations and the bit error rate in the error floor region, which are confirmed by the density evolution and computer simulations.

Accurate stereo matching remains a challenging problem in case of weakly-textured areas, discontinuities and occlusions. In this letter, a novel stereo matching method, consisting of leveraging feature ensemble network to compute matching cost, error detection network to predict outliers and priority-based occlusion disambiguation for refinement, is presented. Experiments on the Middlebury benchmark demonstrate that the proposed method yields competitive results against the state-of-the-art algorithms.

In this paper, a study on the design and implementation of uniform 4-level quantizers for soft-decision decodings for binary linear codes is shown. Simulation results on quantized Viterbi decoding with a 4-level quantizer for the (64,42,8) Reed-Muller code show that the optimum stepsize, which is derived from the cutoff rate, gives an almost optimum error performance. In addition, the simulation results show that the case where the number of optimum codewords is larger than the one for a received sequence causes non-negligible degradation on error performance at high SN ratios of Eb/N0.

As application hardware designs and implementations in a short term are required, high-level synthesis is more and more essential EDA technique nowadays. In deep-submicron era, interconnection delays are not negligible even in high-level synthesis thus distributed-register and -controller architectures (DR architectures) have been proposed in order to cope with this problem. It is also profitable to take data-bitwidth into account in high-level synthesis. In this paper, we propose a bitwidth-aware high-level synthesis algorithm using operation chainings targeting Tiled-DR architectures. Our proposed algorithm optimizes bitwidths of functional units and utilizes the vacant tiles by adding some extra functional units to realize effective operation chainings to generate high performance circuits without increasing the total area. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm reduces the overall latency by up to 47% compared to the conventional approach without area overheads by eliminating unnecessary bitwidths and adding efficient extra FUs for Tiled-DR architectures.

In this correspondence, two types of multiple binary zero correlation zone (ZCZ) sequence sets with inter-set zero cross-correlation zone (ZCCZ) are constructed. Based on orthogonal matrices with order N×N, multiple binary ZCZ sequence sets with inter-set even and odd ZCCZ lengthes are constructed, each set is an optimal ZCZ sequence set with parameters (2N2, N, N+1)-ZCZ, among these ZCZ sequence sets, sequences possess ideal cross-correlation property within a zone of length 2Z or 2Z+1. These resultant multiple ZCZ sequence sets can be used in quasi-synchronous CDMA systems to remove the inter-cell interference (ICI).

In this paper, a weighted multiple bit flipping (WMBF) algorithman for decoding low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is proposed first. Then the improved WMBF algorithm which we call the efficient weighted bit-flipping (EWBF) algorithm is developed. The EWBF algorithm can dynamically choose either multiple bit-flipping or single bit-flipping in each iteration according to the log-likelihood ratio of the error probability of the received bits. Thus, it can efficiently increase the convergence speed of decoding and prevent the decoding process from falling into loop traps. Compared with the parallel weighted bit-flipping (PWBF) algorithm, the EWBF algorithm can achieve significantly lower computational complexity without performance degradation when the Euclidean geometry (EG)-LDPC codes are decoded. Furthermore, the flipping criterion does not require any parameter adjustment.

A relay assignment scheme is proposed in this paper that minimizes the mean delay of transmission for energy harvesting (EH) cooperative communication systems, whose source node and relay nodes are all equipped with energy harvesters. We jointly consider the long-term channel side information (CSI) and energy side information (ESI) of all nodes, and formulate the delay minimization problem as an integer programming problem. To solve this problem, a refined cyclic coordinate method (RCCM) is proposed that considers the cases of fixed-packet-length (FPL) and variable-packet-length (VPL) transmission. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves performance close to that of the real-time relay selection (RRS) scheme with instantaneous CSI and ESI, which gives upper bound of the performance. Moreover, compared with the simple relay rotation (SRR) scheme where each relay has equal service time, the performance of the proposed scheme is significantly improved.