We succeeded in isolating two formaldehyde-degrading fungi, the strains BDF001 and 002, from the rhizospheric soil of formaldehyde-exposed potted golden pothos (Epipremnum aureum), and from the formaldehyde-exposed cultivation soil without plants, respectively. Sequence analysis of the ITS-5.8S rDNA regions confirmed that both fungi were of the same species, Trichoderma virens. These two strains, however, obviously differed from each other in formaldehyde resistance and formaldehyde-degrading ability. The formaldehyde concentration allowing a growth during cultivation for 10 days for the strain BDF001 was up to 0.6%, and that for the strain BDF002 was up to 0.35%. The strain BDF001 showed a formaldehyde-degrading activity 2.3 times higher than that of the strain BDF002. Ranges of the possible growth pH and temperature in the presence of 0.21% formaldehyde were between 4 and 9, and around 25, respectively.

The probability associated with population fitness in a Genetic Algorithm (GA) is studied using the concept of average Euclidean distance. Based on the probability derived from population fitness, the GA can effectively terminate its evolution operations to mitigate the total computational load. Simulation results verify the feasibility of the derived probability used for the GA's termination strategy.

We have developed a new modulation method--inverted pulse position modulation (I-PPM) and subcarrier inverted pulse position modulation (SC-I-PPM)--that provides superior LED brightness for visible-light communications. In addition, the new modulation method SC-I-PPM is not affected by background light. In this paper, we investigated several modulation methods in details and set up a standard with which to evaluate the performance of modulation methods. Several modulation methods are subjected to experiments to clarify their performance. Experiments show that subcarrier modulation suppresses the influence of background light and that our new modulation best maintains LED brightest.

This letter proposes a hierarchical key management scheme based on hash key chain for authentication of roaming mobile nodes in both intra-domain and inter-domain. The key management scheme uses a local master key concept for reducing the latency of the authentication procedure and the communication overhead between a home authentication server and an access point in the foreign domain. The proposed scheme also supports secure separation of the authentication key among local authentication servers using hash key chain.

In this paper, we propose a novel open-loop Automatic Frequency Control (AFC) circuit suitable for 64QAM point-to-multipoint (P-MP) burst communications. The proposed AFC contains two frequency offset detectors. One estimates the phase rotation over long intervals to obtain accurate estimates at the cost of phase ambiguity. The other estimates the phase rotation over short intervals and its output is used to resolve the ambiguity in the following phase ambiguity compensator. Thus, the proposed AFC circuit calculates the phase rotation over sufficiently long periods to yield accurately estimate the carrier frequency offset while suppressing the phase-unwrapping problem. The proposed AFC approaches the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) and so achieves very small residual frequency offset. The proposed AFC circuit can be implemented with much smaller circuit scale than the conventional devices. Computer simulations and experiments confirm that its residual frequency error is less than of 10-5 for the frame format considered; this performance is sufficient for the 64QAM -40 Mbaud system targeted.

To make the best use of the known characteristics of the alternating-direction-implicit finite-difference time-domain (ADI-FDTD) method such as unconditional stability and modeling accuracy, an efficient time domain solution with variable time-step size is proposed. Numerical results show that a time-step size for a given mesh size can be increased preserving a desired numerical accuracy over frequencies of interest.

We examined a Ti-diffused optical waveguide formed on a thin X-cut LiNbO3 substrate for a lower-drive-voltage modulator. Under the single-mode condition, optical mode-size decreases with LiNbO3 substrate thickness below 10 µm. A thin-sheet LiNbO3 modulator could achieve a low-drive-voltage of 1.3 V with a bandwidth of 15 GHz by adopting a narrow electrode-gap.

In this letter, a new segment-level speech/nonspeech classification method based on the Poisson polling technique is proposed. The proposed method makes two modifications from the baseline Poisson polling method to further improve the classification accuracy. One of them is to employ Poisson mixture models to more accurately represent various segmental patterns of the observed frequencies for frame-level input features. The other is the soft counting-based frequency estimation to improve the reliability of the observed frequencies. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed by the experimental results showing the maximum error reduction of 39% compared to the segmentally accumulated log-likelihood ratio-based method.

A multiple-source system for rendering the sound pressure distribution in a target region can be modeled as a multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) system with the inputs being the source strengths and the outputs being the pressures on multiple measuring points/sensors. In this paper, we propose a target-oriented acoustic radiation generation technique (TARGET) for sound field control. For the MIMO system of a given geometry, a series of basic radiation modes, namely, target-oriented radiation modes (TORMs) can be derived using eigenvector analysis. Different TORMs have different contributions to the system control gain, which is defined as the ratio of the acoustic energy generated in the target zone to the transmitter output power. The TARGET can be effectively applied to the sound reproduction and suppression, which correspond the generations of bright and dark zone respectively. In acoustically bright zone generation and sound beamforming, the highest-gain TORM can be employed to determine the optimal source strengths. In active noise control, the strengths of the secondary sources can be derived using low-gain TORMs. Simulation results show that the proposed method has better or comparable performance than the traditional techniques.

A well-defined test structure of organic static-induction transistor (SIT) having regularly sized nano-apertures in the gate electrode has been fabricated by colloidal lithography using 130-nm-diameter polystyrene spheres as shadow masks during vacuum deposition. Transistor characteristics of individual nano-apertures, namely 'nano-SIT,' have been measured using a conductive atomic-force-microscope (AFM) probe as a movable source electrode. Position of the source electrode is found to be more important to increase current on/off ratio than the distance between source and gate electrodes. Experimentally obtained maximum on/off ratio was 710 (at VDS = -4 V, VGS = 0 and 2 V) when a source electrode was fixed at the edge of gate aperture. The characteristics have been then analyzed using semiconductor device simulation by employing a strongly non-linear carrier mobility model in the CuPc layer. From device simulation, source current is found to be modulated not only by a saddle point potential in the gate aperture area but also by a pinch-off effect near the source electrode. According to the obtained results, a modified structure of organic SIT and an adequate acceptor concentration is proposed. On/off ratio of the modified organic SIT is expected to be 100 times larger than that of a conventional one.

Frequency-domain equalization (FDE) based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion can significantly improve the BER performance of DS- and MC-CDMA systems in a severe frequency-selective fading channel. However, since the frequency-distorted signal cannot be completely equalized, the residual inter-code interference (ICI) limits the BER performance improvement. 4G systems must support much higher variable rate data services. Orthogonal multicode transmission technique has flexibility in offering variable rate services. However, the BER performance degrades as the number of parallel codes increases. In this paper, we propose an iterative frequency-domain soft interference cancellation (IFDSIC) scheme for multicode DS- and MC-CDMA systems and their achievable BER performances are evaluated by computer simulation.

As VLSI technology advances, delay variations will become more serious. Delay-insensitive asynchronous dual-rail circuits tolerate any delay variation, but their energy consumption is more than double that of the single-rail circuits because signal transitions occur every cycle in all bits regardless of the input bit pattern. However, in functional units, a significant number of input bits may not change from the previous input in many cases. In such a situation, calculation of these bits is not required. Thus, we propose a method, called unflip-bits control, makes use of the above situation, to reduce energy consumption. We evaluate the energy consumption and performance penalty for the method using HSPICE and the verilog-XL simulator, and compare the method with the conventional dual-rail circuit and a synchronous circuit. Our evaluation results reveal that the proposed asynchronous dual-rail circuit has a 12-60% lower energy consumption compared with a conventional asynchronous dual-rail circuit.

To improve Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) receiver performance, we need to use better signal processing algorithm. However, it is impossible to modify the signal processing algorithm in DAB commercial hardware. In addition, the notebook PC based software radio research platform allows convenient acquisition of the massive radio data at variant environments and online analysis with variable signal processing procedure more easily. We have developed the first prototype portable software radio research platform for DAB which consists of a USB RF receiver module, USB interface and PC based software for device controlling and signal processing. Iterative decoding and ICI cancellation are also added to improve the performance in mobile channels.

We propose a voltage control scheme for 6T SRAM cells that makes a minimum operation voltage down to 0.3 V under DVS environment. A supply voltage to the memory cells and wordline drivers, bitline voltage, and body bias voltage of load pMOSFETs are controlled according to read and write operations, which secures operation margins even at a low operation voltage. A self-aligned timing control with a dummy wordline and its feedback is also introduced to guarantee stable operation in a wide range of the supply voltage. A measurement result of a 64-kb SRAM in a 90-nm process technology shows that a power reduction of 30% can be achieved at 100 MHz. In a 65-nm 64-Mb SRAM, a 74% power saving is expected at 1/6 of the maximum operating frequency. The performance penalty by the proposed scheme is less than 1%, and area overhead is 5.6%.

The I/Q unbalance which is generated by a non-ideal component is an inevitable physical phenomenon and leads to performance degradation when we implement a practical two-dimensional (2-D) modulation system. In this paper, we provide an exact and general expression involving the 2-D Gaussian Q-function for the SER/BER of arbitrary 2-D signaling with I/Q amplitude and phase unbalances over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel by using the coordinate rotation and shifting technique. Through Monte Carlo simulations we verify our expression provided here for 16-star Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM).

The rapidly increasing bandwidth requirements of IP traffic mean that networks based on optical technologies in conjunction with IP routing technologies will provide the backbone of the next generation Internet. One of the major issues is how to construct an optical-technology-based backbone network that offers the economical transport of large-scale IP/MPLS services while achieving reliable, robust network. The key to achieving this objective lies in multilayer coordination technologies using Multi-Layer Service Network [MLSN] Architecture, that we previously proposed [2]. One of the important aspects of MLSN architecture is ability to effectively use GMPLS network resources by IP/MPLS service networks. We propose extensions to previously proposed MLSN architecture. The proposed extensions to MLSN architecture are tailored to address "service virtualization and separation" of various service networks over GMPLS backbone. As a part of this extended MLSN architecture, we introduce novel concepts known as Logical Router (LR) and Virtual Router (VR) that would enable border router to be services domain router, so that it can connect multiple service networks such as L2VPN, L3VPN etc., over GMPLS backbone by offering service separation or virtualization. This service separation/isolation greatly enhances the reliability of next generation networks, as any failure on one service should be isolated from others. We evaluate our extended network architecture against requirements for the large scale network targeting at introducing such new technology to cope with vast traffic explosion and challenges in operation and service provision sophistication.

We present a TSK (Takagi-Sugeno-Kang)-based Linguistic Fuzzy Model (TSK-LFM) with uncertain model output. Based on the Linguistic Model (LM) proposed by Pedrycz, we develop a comprehensive design framework. The main design process is composed of the automatic generation of the contexts, fuzzy rule extraction by Context-based Fuzzy C-Means (CFCM) clustering, connection of bias term, and combination of TSK and linguistic context. Finally, we contrast the performance of the presented models with other models for coagulant dosing process in a water purification plant.

In this letter, we suggest a noise estimation method which can be applied for speech enhancement in various noise environments. The proposed method consists of the following two main processes to analyze and estimate efficiently the noise from the noisy speech. First, a least-squares line is used, which is obtained by applying coefficient magnitudes in node with a uniform wavelet packet transform to a least squares method. Next, a differential forgetting factor and a correlation coefficient per subband are applied, where each subband consists of several nodes with the uniform wavelet packet transform. In particular, this approach has the ability to update noise estimation by using the estimated noise at the previous frame only instead of employing the statistical information of long past frames and explicit nonspeech frames detection consisted of noise signals. In objective assessments, we observed that the performance of the proposed method was better than that of the compared methods. Furthermore, our method showed a reliable result even at low SNR.

This paper describes a flexible strategy to generate candidate answers for factoid questions in Question Answering (QA) systems. Most QA systems have predefined the conceptual categories for candidate answers. But if the conceptual category of answers to any question is not prepared in the QA system, it is hard to extract correct answers to that question. Therefore, we propose an extraction method for IS-A relation patterns which describe relations between the nominal target concepts of question and candidate answers. The extracted IS-A relation patterns can be used for questions with an unexpected target concept.

Frequency-domain equalization (FDE) based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion can replace the conventional rake combining while offering significantly improved bit error rate (BER) performance for the downlink DS-CDMA in a frequency-selective fading channel. However, the presence of residual inter-chip-inference (ICI) after FDE produces orthogonality distortion among the spreading codes and the BER performance degrades as the level of multiplexing increases. In this paper, we propose a joint MMSE frequency-domain equalization (FDE) and ICI cancellation to improve the BER performance of the DS-CDMA downlink. In the proposed scheme, the residual ICI replica in the frequency-domain is generated and subtracted from each frequency component of the received signal after MMSE-FDE. The MMSE weight at each iteration is derived taking into account the residual ICI. The effect of the proposed ICI cancellation scheme is confirmed by computer simulation.