We present dynamic mode switching characteristic by using a 2 × 2 optical mode switch based on silicon waveguide. The configuration of optical mode switch is similar to MZI where the width of input and output ports are designed to permit the combining of the fundamental mode and the first order mode. We designed the symmetrical arms with phase shifter based on p-i-n structure in one arm to generate a π-phase difference between each arm. As a result, mode switching with the injection current of 60mA (5.7V) was successfully achieved with the mode crosstalk of -10dB at λ=1550nm. A minimum of less than 60ns and 40ns mode switching time for the fundamental mode to first order mode and first order mode to fundamental mode, was achieved respectively in this time.

The Life Intelligence and Office Information System (LOIS) Technical Committee of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE) dates its origin to May 1986. This Technical Committee (TC) has covered the research fields of the office related systems for more than 30 years. Over this time, this TC, under its multiple name changes, has served as a forum for research and provided many opportunities for not only office users but also ordinary users of systems and services to present ideas and discussions. Therefore, these advanced technologies have been diffused from big enterprises to small companies and home users responsible for their management and operation. This paper sums up the technology trends and views of the office related systems and services covered in the 30 years of presentations of the LOIS Technical Committees by using the new literature analysis system based on the IEICE Knowledge Discovery system (I-Scover system).

We propose a method for automatic emphasis estimation using conditional random fields. In our experiments, the value of F-measure obtained using our proposed method (0.31) was higher than that obtained using a random emphasis method (0.20), a method using TF-IDF (0.21), and a method based on LexRank (0.26). On the contrary, the value of F-measure of obtained using our proposed method (0.28) was slightly worse as compared with that obtained using manual estimation (0.26-0.40, with an average of 0.35).

Emerging digital payment services, also known as FinTech, have enabled various types of advanced payment transactions (such as Google Wallet, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, etc.). However, offline peer-to-peer cash transactions still make up about 25.6% of the overall financial transactions in everyday life. By investigating existing online and offline payment systems, we identify three key challenges for building a digital cash transaction system with core features of the offline cash transactions: self-verifiability of digital cash; user anonymity; atomic cash transfer for double spending/depositing protection. In this paper, we propose OPERA, an offline peer-to-peer digital cash transaction system that addresses the three challenges. It newly introduces a concept of ‘one-time-readable memory(ORM)’ and ‘digital token’ which is a unit of self-verifiable digital cash. The one-time readability from ORM and three-stage token exchange protocol enable OPERA to provide uniqueness to digital cash and to allow a complete offline digital payment. OPERA devices are enhanced with TCPA technology to ensure the integrity of the physical device package. To evaluate the feasibility and resilience of the OPERA design, we built a prototype on a customized embedded board.

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard enables a short range, low data rate and low power communication between devices in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In IEEE 802.15.4, a slotted carrier sensing multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) algorithm is employed to coordinate a large number of sensor devices. Unlike IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN), energy consumption requirements enable it to use fewer number of backoffs, which adversely increase collisions, resulting in degradation of energy consumption. In this letter, we devise an adaptive backoff scheme in WSN whose backoff range is adjusted depending on the contention level, and present its Markov model for mathematical analysis. The proposed scheme is analyzed and its efficiency is validated by ns-2 simulation in respect to network throughput and energy consumption. Its performance is also compared with the standard and previous works, showing that it outperforms them for a whole range of arrival rate.

This paper presents an application of low-coherence interferometry for measurement of mode field diameters (MFDs) of a few-mode fiber and shows its performance compared with another method using a mode multiplexer. We found that the presented method could measure MFDs in a few-mode fiber even without any special mode multiplexers.

An ultra-compact InGaAs photodetector (PD) is demonstrated based on a photonic crystal (PhC) waveguide to meet the demand for a photoreceiver for future dense photonic integration. Although the PhC-PD has a length of only 1.7µm and a capacitance of less than 1fF, a high responsivity of 1A/W was observed both theoretically and experimentally. This low capacitance PD allows us to expect a resistor-loaded receiver to be realized that requires no electrical amplifiers. We fabricated a resistor-loaded PhC-PD for light-to-voltage conversion, and demonstrated a kV/W efficiency with a GHz bandwidth without using amplifiers. This will lead to a photoreceiver with an ultralow energy consumption of less than 1fJ/bit, which is a step along the road to achieving a dense photonic network and processor on a chip.

We propose a novel structure that can reduce the power consumption and extend the transmission distance of an electro-absorption modulator integrated with a DFB (EADFB) laser. To overcome the trade-off relationship of the optical loss and chirp parameter of the EA modulator, we integrate a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) with an EADFB laser. With the proposed SOA assisted extended reach EADFB laser (AXEL) structure, the LD and SOA sections are operated by an electrically connected input port. We describe a design for AXEL that optimizes the LD and SOA length ratio when their total operation current is 80mA. By using the designed AXEL, the power consumption of a 10-Gbit/s, 1.55-µm EADFB laser is reduced by 1/2 and at the same time the transmission distance is extended from 80 to 100km.

This paper presents a programmable wideband low pass filter (LPF) with Continuous-Time (CT)/Discrete-Time (DT) hybrid architecture. Unlike the conventional DT LPF, the proposed LPF eliminates sample & hold circuits, enabling to expand available bandwidth. The transfer function and the influence of the circuit imperfection are derived from CT/DT hybrid analysis. A prototype has been fabricated in 40 nm CMOS process. The proposed LPF achieves 2.5 GHz bandwidth by wideband equalization, which offers capacitance ratio (Cratio) and clock frequency (fCK) programmability. The proposed LPF occupies only 0.048 mm2 of active area.

The analysis and design of a full 360 degrees hybrid coupler phase shifter with integrated distributed elements low pass filters is presented. Pi-section filter is incorporated into hybrid coupler phase shifter for harmonic suppression. The physical size of the proposed structure is close to that of the conventional hybrid coupler phase shifter. The maximum phase shift range is bounded by the port impedance ratio of the hybrid coupler phase shifter. Furthermore, the phase shift range is reduced if series inductance in the reflective load deviates from the optimum value. Numerical and parametric analyses are used to find the equivalent circuit of the pi-section filter for consistent relative phase shift. To validate our analysis, the proposed phase shifter operates at 8.6GHz was fabricated and measured. Over the frequency range of interest, the fabricated phase shifter suppresses second harmonic and achieves analog phase shift of 0 to 360 degrees at the passband, agreeing with the theoretical and simulation results.

With the successful development and rapid advancement of social networking technology, people tend to exchange and share information via online social networks, such as Facebook and LINE.Massive amounts of information are aggregated promptly and circulated quickly among people. However, with the enormous volume of human-interactions, various types of swindles via online social networks have been launched in recent years. Effectively detecting fraudulent activities on social networks has taken on increased importance, and is a topic of ongoing interest. In this paper, we develop a fraud analysis and detection system based on real-time messaging communications, which constitute one of the most common human-interacted services of online social networks. An integrated platform consisting of various text-mining techniques, such as natural language processing, matrix processing and content analysis via a latent semantic model, is proposed. In the system implementation, we first collect a series of fraud events, all of which happened in Taiwan, to construct analysis modules for detecting such fraud events. An Android-based application is then built for alert notification when dubious logs and fraud events happen.

A single-dimensional interface which enables users to obtain diverse localizations of audio sources is proposed. In many conventional interfaces for arranging audio sources, there are multiple arrangement parameters, some of which allow users to control positions of audio sources. However, it is difficult for users who are unfamiliar with these systems to optimize the arrangement parameters since the number of possible settings is huge. We propose a simple, single-dimensional interface for adjusting arrangement parameters, allowing users to sample several diverse audio source arrangements and easily find their preferred auditory localizations. To select subsets of arrangement parameters from all of the possible choices, auditory-localization space vectors (ASVs) are defined to represent the auditory localization of each arrangement parameter. By selecting subsets of ASVs which are approximately orthogonal, we can choose arrangement parameters which will produce diverse auditory localizations. Experimental evaluations were conducted using music composed of three audio sources. Subjective evaluations confirmed that novice users can obtain diverse localizations using the proposed interface.

This paper presents a hierarchical-masked image filtering method for privacy-protection. Cameras are widely used for various applications, e.g., crime surveillance, environment monitoring, and marketing. However, invasion of privacy has become a serious social problem, especially regarding the use of surveillance cameras. Many surveillance cameras point at many people; thus, a large amount of our private information of our daily activities are under surveillance. However, several surveillance cameras currently on the market and related research often have a complicated or institutional masking privacy-protection functionality. To overcome this problem, a Hierarchical-Masked image Filtering (HMF) method is proposed, which has unmaskable (mask reversal) capability and is applicable to current surveillance camera systems for privacy-information protection and can satisfy privacy-protection related requirements. This method has five main features: unmasking of the original image from only the masked image and a cipher key, hierarchical-mask level control using parameters for the length of a pseudorandom number, robustness against malicious attackers, fast processing on an embedded processor, and applicability of mask operation to current surveillance camera systems. Previous studies have difficulty in providing these features. To evaluate HMF on actual equipment, an HMF-based prototype system is developed that mainly consists of a USB web camera, ultra-compact single board computer, and notebook PC. Through experiments, it is confirmed that the proposed method achieves mask level control and is robust against attacks. The increase in processing time of the HMF-based prototype system compared with a conventional non-masking system is only about 1.4%. This paper also reports on the comparison of the proposed method with conventional privacy protection methods and favorable responses of people toward the HMF-based prototype system both domestically and abroad. Therefore, the proposed HMF method can be applied to embedded systems such as those equipped with surveillance cameras for protecting privacy.

Qplus-AIR is a real-time operating system for avionics, and its safety and correctness should be analyzed and guaranteed. We performed model checking a version of Qplus-AIR with the Times model checker and identified one abnormal case that might result in safety-critical situations.

Bloom Filter is a bit array (a one-dimensional storage structure) that provides a compact representation for a set of data, which can be used to answer the membership query in an efficient manner with a small number of false positives. It has a lot of applications in many areas. In this paper, we extend the design of Bloom Filter by using a multi-dimensional matrix to replace the one-dimensional structure with three different implementations, namely OFFF, WOFF, FFF. We refer the extended Bloom Filter as Feng Filter. We show the false positive rates of our method. We compare the false positive rate of OFFF with that of the traditional one-dimensional Bloom Filter and show that under certain condition, OFFF has a lower false positive rate. Traditional Bloom Filter can be regarded as a special case of our Feng Filter.

Web browsing services are expanding as smartphones are becoming increasingly popular worldwide. To provide customers with appropriate quality of web-browsing services, quality design and in-service quality management on the basis of quality of experience (QoE) is important. We propose a web-browsing QoE estimation model. The most important QoE factor for web-browsing is the waiting time for a web page to load. Next, the variation in the communication quality based on a mobile network should be considered. We developed a subjective quality assessment test to clarify QoE characteristics in terms of waiting time using 20 different types of web pages and constructed a web-page QoE estimation model. We then conducted a subjective quality assessment test of web-browsing to clarify the relationship between web-page QoE and web-browsing QoE for three web sites. We obtained the following two QoE characteristics. First, the main factor influencing web-browsing QoE is the average web-page QoE. Second, when web-page QoE variation occurs, a decrease in web-page QoE with a huge amplitude causes the web-browsing QoE to decrease. We used these characteristics in constructing our web-browsing QoE estimation model. The verification test results using non-training data indicate the accuracy of the model. We also show that our findings are applicable to web-browsing quality design and solving management issues on the basis of QoE.

To suppress intercell interference for three-cell half-duplex relay systems, joint interference suppression and multiuser detection (MUD) schemes that estimate weight coefficients by the recursive least-squares (RLS) algorithm have been proposed but show much worse bit error rate (BER) performance than maximum likelihood detection (MLD). To improve the BER performance, this paper proposes a joint interference suppression and MUD scheme that estimates the weight coefficients by eigenvalue decomposition. The proposed scheme carries the same advantages as the conventional RLS based schemes; it does not need channel state information (CSI) feedback while incurring much less amount of computational complexity than MLD. In addition, it needs to know only two out of three preambles used in the system. Computer simulations of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission under three-cell and frequency selective fading conditions are conducted. It is shown that the eigendecomposition-based scheme overwhelmingly outperforms the conventional RLS-based scheme although requiring higher computational complexity.

Novel design approaches for microwave active circuits using composite right-/left-handed (CRLH) transmission line (TL) stubs are presented. We show that, by modifying the dispersion diagram of the CRLH TL stub, the frequency band or the harmonic tuning capability can be enhanced in such a way that it would have been difficult or impractical if done using conventional micro-strip line stubs. The frequency response of the CRLH TL stub can be controlled almost arbitrarily while at the same time reducing the stub length significantly, because the dispersion curve in the left-handed region and in the right-handed region is controlled independently. As a proof of concept, a triple-band rectifier, single-band and dual-band harmonic tuning circuits for class-F amplifiers are demonstrated.

In order to satisfy the very high traffic demand in crowded hotspot areas and realize adequate security in future fifth-generation networks, this paper studies physical-layer security in the downlink of a two-tier ultra dense heterogeneous network, where a ubiquitous array formed by ultra dense deployed small-cells surrounds a macrocell base station. In this paper, the locations of legitimate users and eavesdroppers are drawn from Poisson point processes. Then, the cumulative distribution functions of the receive signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio for legitimate users and eavesdroppers are derived. Further, the average secrecy rate and secrecy coverage probability for each tier as well as for the whole network are investigated. Finally, we analyze the influences on secrecy performance caused by eavesdropper density, transmit power allocation ratio, antenna number allocation ratio, and association area radius.

Locally repairable code (LRC) can recover any codeword symbol failure by accessing a small number of other symbols, which can increase the efficiency during the repair process. In a distributed storage system with locally repairable codes, any node failure can be rebuilt by accessing other fixed nodes. It is a promising prospect for the application of LRC. In this paper, some methods of constructing matrices which can generate codes with small locality will be proposed firstly. By analyzing the parameters, we construct the generator matrices of the best-known ternary linear codes of dimension 6, using methods such as shortening, puncturing and expansion. After analyzing the linear dependence of the column vectors in the generator matrices above, we find out the locality of the codes they generate. Many codes with small locality have been found.