In our former paper, we formalized a Logic of Multiple-valued Argumentation (LMA) on an expressive knowledge representation language, Extended Annotated Logic Programming (EALP), in order to make it possible to construct arguments under uncertain information. In this paper, We confirm expressivity and applicability by applying LMA to arguments reflecting Easterners' preference over argumentation as well as Eastern thought and philosophy. In doing so, we exploit a wide variety of complete lattices as truth-values, showing the flexibility and adaptability of LMA to various multiple-valuedness required in argumentation under uncertain information. In particular, we consider a significant specialization of LMA to Tetralemma with an Eastern mind. Through various argument examples, it is shown that LMA allows for a kind of pluralistic argumentation, or a fusion of Eastern and Western argumentation.

This paper proposes the application of tree-structured clustering to the processing of noisy speech collected under various SNR conditions in the framework of piecewise-linear transformation (PLT)-based HMM adaptation for noisy speech. Three kinds of clustering methods are described: a one-step clustering method that integrates noise and SNR conditions and two two-step clustering methods that construct trees for each SNR condition. According to the clustering results, a noisy speech HMM is made for each node of the tree structure. Based on the likelihood maximization criterion, the HMM that best matches the input speech is selected by tracing the tree from top to bottom, and the selected HMM is further adapted by linear transformation. The proposed methods are evaluated by applying them to a Japanese dialogue recognition system. The results confirm that the proposed methods are effective in recognizing digitally noise-added speech and actual noisy speech issued by a wide range of speakers under various noise conditions. The results also indicate that the one-step clustering method gives better performance than the two-step clustering methods.

The process of evaluating and selecting Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) products is complicated because of conflicting priorities of the stakeholders, complex interdependences among the evaluation criteria, multiple evaluation objectives, changing system requirements, and a large number of similar COTS products with extreme capability differences. Numerous COTS evaluation and selection methods have been proposed to address the complexity of the process. Some of these methods have been successfully applied in industry. However, negotiation to resolve stakeholder conflicts is still an ad hoc process. In this paper, we present a systematic model that assists the COTS selection stakeholders in identifying conflicts, as well as in determining and evaluating conflict resolution options. Our model is facilitated by an agent-based decision support system, which has user agents that assist the stakeholders in the COTS evaluation and negotiation process. The agents utilize a hybrid of analytic and artificial intelligence techniques to identify conflicts and the corresponding agreement options. Moreover, each user agent analyzes the agreement options in detail before advising its client about which goals to optimize, and which goals to compromise in order to reach agreement with the other stakeholders. Finally, the community of agents facilitates information sharing among stakeholders in a bid to improve the quality of their COTS selection decisions.

We propose a method for the recovery of projective structure and motion by the factorization of the rank 1 matrix containing the images of all points in all views. In our method, the unknowns are the 3D motion and relative depths of the set of points, not their 3D positions. The coordinates of the points along the camera plane are given by their image positions in the first frame. The knowledge of the coordinates along the camera plane enables us to solve the SFM problem by iteratively factorizing the rank 1 matrix. This simplifies the decomposition compared with the SVD (Singular Value Decomposition). Experiments with both simulated and real data show that the method is efficient for the recovery of projective structure and motion.

The radiation properties of oscillating electric dipoles are studied theoretically for three and four layered systems including a single metallic slab based on angular spectrum representation of vector spherical waves. One of the remarkable results obtained is the transmission energy spectrum showing strong dependence on the thickness of a dielectric layer placed between oscillating electric dipole and metallic surface, which explains the experimental results of molecular fluorescence into surface plasmon modes. The theory based on angular spectrum representation and tunneling current provides us with a clear identification of plasmonic excitation transfer, transmission loss associated with plasmon transport in metallic layer, and energy dissipation or quenching of excitation due to surface plasmon excitation at the metallic surface in relation to the characteristic complex wave number of evanescent waves.

In this paper we present a network layer based admission control and simple class based service differentiation model to support QoS in mobile ad hoc network. Our distributed admission control procedure works along with the route finding phase of reactive routing protocols for mobile ad hoc network (AODV, DSR etc). We also propose a simple class based distributed service differentiation system to support QoS once a traffic is admitted by our admission control mechanism. The proposed service differentiation is based on DiffServ model and includes modifications like configuration of each node with edge and core functionality, dynamic selection of edge/core functionality, use of minimal and simple classes. Simulation results show that our system allows seven times more real time traffic in the network than the proposed QoS for AODV model while satisfying the demanded end-to-end delay and providing low jitter.

The encoding process of vector quantization (VQ) is a time bottleneck preventing its practical applications. In order to speed up VQ encoding, it is very effective to use lower dimensional features of a vector to estimate how large the Euclidean distance between the input vector and a candidate codeword could be so as to reject most unlikely codewords. The three popular statistical features of the average or the mean, the variance, and L2 norm of a vector have already been adopted in the previous works individually. Recently, these three statistical features were combined together to derive a sequential EEENNS search method in [6], which is very efficient but still has obvious computational redundancy. This Letter aims at giving a mathematical analysis on the results of EEENNS method further and pointing out that it is actually unnecessary to use L2 norm feature anymore in fast VQ encoding if the mean and the variance are used simultaneously as proposed in IEENNS method. In other words, L2 norm feature is redundant for a rejection test in fast VQ encoding. Experimental results demonstrated an approximate 10-20% reduction of the total computational cost for various detailed images in the case of not using L2 norm feature so that it confirmed the correctness of the mathematical analysis.

This paper present three characteristic functions which can express the luminance distribute characteristic much better. Based on these functions a region classification algorithm is presented. The algorithm can offer more information on regions' similarity and greatly improve the efficiency and performance of match seeking in fractal coding. It can be widely applied to many kinds of fractal coding algorithms. Analysis and experimental results proved that it can offer more information on luminance distribute characteristics among regions and greatly improve the decoding quality and compression ratio with holding the running speed.

In this paper, we evaluate the computational complexity and the performance of the RAKE receivers for the Direct Sequence--Ultra Wideband (DS-UWB) with considering the accuracy of channel estimation in a multipath channel. As RAKE receivers for DS-UWB, we consider the maximal-ratio combining (MRC)-RAKE, the minimum mean square error (MMSE)-RAKE, and the MRC-RAKE-Equalizer that is the MRC-RAKE followed by a liner equalizer. Generally, if the channel estimation is perfect, as the number of fingers or taps increases, the performance of each receiver is improved, however the computational complexity of each receiver increases. In practice, the channel estimation is not perfect. The channel estimation error makes their performances degraded. Therefore, the performances of the RAKE receivers depend on the accuracy of channel estimation. Consequently, we evaluate the computational complexities and the Bit Error Rates (BERs) of MRC-RAKE, MMSE-RAKE, and MRC-RAKE-Equalizer with considering the accuracy of channel estimation for DS-UWB. We show that the accuracy of channel estimation affects the BER of each receiver significantly. We also show that when the accuracy of channel estimation is high, MRC-RAKE-Equalizer can achieve the better BER than MMSE-RAKE with less computational complexity, while MMSE-RAKE can achieve the better BER than MRC-RAKE-Equalizer when the accuracy of channel estimation is low.

In delay fault BIST (Built-In-Self-Test), an adjacency test pattern generation scheme effectively generates robust test patterns. The traditional adjacency test pattern generation schemes use LFSR to generate first patterns, and thus they cannot generate test patterns for circuits with more than 30 inputs with high fault coverage in a practical amount of time. This paper proposes a deterministic delay fault BIST method using adjacency test pattern generation. The proposed scheme uses first patterns generated by a deterministic algorithm based on the analysis of independent partial circuits on the circuit under test. Experiments show that test patterns generated by the proposed method have both high fault coverage and short test length, resulting in a short test time.

Using several high rate recursive convolutional codes as the basic element and the trace criteria as the designing principle, a new kind of recursive space-time trellis code with more flexible and higher data rate is presented for the serially concatenated space-time code. When 2b-ary modulation and N transmit antennas are used, the data rate of the new code can be arranged from b bps/Hz to Nb-1bps/Hz by modifying the number of recursive convolutional codes and the data rate of each code.

This investigation proposed two array beamformers SPFDBB (Soft Penalty Frequency Domain Block Beamformer) and FDABB (Frequency Domain Adjustable Block Beamformer). Compared with the conventional beamformers, these frequency-domain methods can significantly reduce the computation power requirement in ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) based applications. Like other reference signal based techniques, SPFDBB and FDABB minimize microphone's mismatch, desired signal cancellation caused by reflection effects and resolution due to the array's position. Additionally, these proposed methods are suitable for both near-field and far-field environments. Generally, the convolution relation between channel and speech source in time domain cannot be modeled accurately as a multiplication in the frequency domain with a finite window size, especially in ASR applications. SPFDBB and FDABB can approximate this multiplication by treating several frames as a block to achieve a better beamforming result. Moreover, FDABB adjusts the number of frames on-line to cope with the variation of characteristics in both speech and interference signals. A better performance was found to be achievable by combining these methods with an ASR mechanism.

In this paper, we present the method for identifying an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Networks (ANFN) with Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) fuzzy type based on fuzzy granulation. We also develop a systematic approach to generating fuzzy if-then rules from a given input-output data. The proposed ANFN is designed by the use of fuzzy granulation realized via context-based fuzzy clustering. This clustering technique builds information granules in the form of fuzzy sets and develops clusters by preserving the homogeneity of the clustered patterns associated with the input and output space. The experimental results reveal that the proposed model yields a better performance in comparison with Linguistic Models (LM) and Radial Basis Function Networks (RBFN) based on context-based fuzzy clustering introduced in the previous literature for Box-Jenkins gas furnace data and automobile MPG prediction.

This paper proposes a user revocation scheme for decentralized networks. User revocation is a method to distribute a group decryption key that is shared by n users in a group so that all but d revoked users can obtain the key. In decentralized networks such as ad-hoc networks, mesh networks, and Peer to Peer (P2P) networks, a sender should revoke the access of a dishonest user or an unauthorized user as soon as possible to protect the security of group communication. However, if the sender distributes the group key to all users aside from the revoked user, it would take a long time to revoke a user in a large group. In addition, users must set shared group keys for each user without a privileged center. We propose a scheme in which the amount of transmission and the key storage of each user are small.

To use the voluntary electromyogram (EMG) as a control signal of the EMG controlled functional electrical stimulator (FES), it is required to reduce the stimulation artifact and non-voluntary contribution (M-wave). In this study, a Gram-Schmidt (GS) prediction error filter (PEF) that can effectively eliminates the M-wave from voluntary EMG is presented. Also, the presented GS PEF is implemented on the field the programmable gate array (FPGA) for real-time processing and the performance is tested with simulated and real signals. Experimental results showed that GS-PEF was effective in reducing M-wave and preserving voluntary EMG.

We demonstrate a novel fiber device exhibiting magnetic circular dichroism (MCD) and Faraday rotation in sharpened optical fibers coated with Fe. The degree of MCD was 0.68 in a magnetic field of 0.35 T and the Faraday rotation angle was as great as 110 degrees. Such great magneto-optical effect is due to optical near-field interactions in the sub-wavelength region, i.e., in the tip of the near-field fiber probe. These effects can be attributed to the large magnitude of the magneto optical coefficient of Fe.

To increase the number of the embedded secrets and to improve the quality of the stego-image in the vector quantization (VQ)-based information hiding scheme, in this paper, we present a novel information-hiding scheme to embed secrets into the side match vector quantization (SMVQ) compressed code. First, a host image is partitioned into non-overlapping blocks. For these seed blocks of the image, VQ is adopted without hiding secrets. Then, for each of the residual blocks, SMVQ or VQ is employed according to the smoothness of the block such that the proper codeword is chosen from the state codebook or the original codebook to compress it. Finally, these compressed codes represent not only the host image but also the secret data. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed scheme is better than other VQ-based information hiding scheme in terms of the embedding capacity and the image quality. Moreover, in the proposed scheme, the compression rate is better than the compared scheme.

This investigation proposed a novel dual-mode circular patch bandpass filter (BPF) with enhanced stopband performance. The novelty of the proposed structure is to use a pair of square etched areas acting as a perturbation element on the circular patch resonator such that two split modes are coupled and the filter structure can be reduced. The coupling coefficients of two split modes are obtained. To improve the stopband performance, a pairs of H-shaped defected ground structure (DGS) cells are used below the input/output port to suppress the spurious response of the proposed BPF. The equivalent circuit of the DGS cell is discussed and the relations between bandstop characteristic and the suitable DGS dimensions are also investigated. The proposed BPF is demonstrated with a central frequency fo = 2.2 GHz, a 3-dB fractional bandwidth of 8% and a wider stopband of -35 dB from 2.5 to 6 GHz. Measured results of experimental filter have good agreement with the theoretical simulated results.

Over the past few years, a considerable number of studies have been conducted on modeling the bargaining game using artificial agents on within-model interaction. However, very few attempts have been made at study on the interaction and co-evolutionary process among heterogeneous artificial agents. Therefore, we present two kinds of artificial agents, based on genetic algorithm (GA) and reinforcement learning (RL), which play a game on between-model interaction. We investigate their co-evolutionary processes and analyze their parameters using the analysis of variance.

Under dynamic and heterogenous environment, the need for adaptability and rapid response time to information service systems has become increasingly important. To cope with the continuously changing conditions of service provision and utilization, Faded Information Field (FIF) has been proposed, which is an agent-based distributed information service system architecture. In the case of a mono-service request, the system is designed to improve users' access time and preserve load balancing through the information structure. However, with interdependent requests of multi-service increasing, adaptability, reliability and timeliness have to be assured by the system. In this paper, the relationship between the timeliness and the reliability of correlated services allocation and access is clarified. Based on these factors, the autonomous network-based heterogeneous information services integration technology to provide one-stop service for users' multi-service requests is proposed. We proved the effectiveness of the proposed technology through the simulation and the results show that the integrated service can reduce the total users access time compared with the conventional systems.