To help student nurses learn to transfer patients from a bed to a wheelchair, this paper proposes a system for automatic skill evaluation in nurses' training for this task. Multiple Kinect sensors were employed, in conjunction with colored markers attached to the trainee's and patient's clothing and to the wheelchair, in order to measure both participants' postures as they interacted closely during the transfer and to assess the correctness of the trainee's movements and use of equipment. The measurement method involved identifying body joints, and features of the wheelchair, via the colors of the attached markers and calculating their 3D positions by combining color and depth data from two sensors. We first developed an automatic segmentation method to convert a continuous recording of the patient transfer process into discrete steps, by extracting from the raw sensor data the defining features of the movements of both participants during each stage of the transfer. Next, a checklist of 20 evaluation items was defined in order to evaluate the trainee nurses' skills in performing the patient transfer. The items were divided into two types, and two corresponding methods were proposed for classifying trainee performance as correct or incorrect. One method was based on whether the participants' relevant body parts were positioned in a predefined spatial range that was considered ‘correct’ in terms of safety and efficacy (e.g., feet placed appropriately for balance). The second method was based on quantitative indexes and thresholds for parameters describing the participants' postures and movements, as determined by a Bayesian minimum-error method. A prototype system was constructed and experiments were performed to assess the proposed approach. The evaluation of nurses' patient transfer skills was performed successfully and automatically. The automatic evaluation results were compared with evaluation by human teachers and achieved an accuracy exceeding 80%.

In cognitive radio networks, the dynamic traffic of the primary user can lead to not only the spectrum sensing performance degradation, but also co-channel interference between primary user and secondary user, and, furthermore, the secondary system throughput can be decreased. Taking into account the impact of the dynamic primary-user traffic on spectrum sensing performance and the secondary throughput, we study the optimization problem of maximizing the secondary throughput under the constraints of probability of detection, average interference and transmit power budget, and derive its optimal solution. The optimal power allocation scheme and the algorithm that can find the optimal sensing time are also proposed. The proposed algorithm is of great practical significance in the scenario where primary-user traffic varies very quickly, for example, in public safety spectrum band.

CLEFIA is a 128-bit block cipher proposed by Shirai et al. at FSE2007. It has been reported that CLEFIA has a 9-round saturation characteristic, in which 32bits of the output of 9-th round 112-th order differential equals to zero. By using this characteristic, a 14-round CLEFIA with 256-bit secret key is attacked with 2113 blocks of chosen plaintext and 2244.5 times of data encryption. In this paper, we focused on a higher order differential of CLEFIA. This paper introduces two new concepts for higher order differential which are control transform for the input and observation transform for the output. With these concepts, we found a new 6-round saturation characteristic, in which 24bits of the output of 6-th round 9-th order differential equals to zero. We also show a new 9-round saturation characteristic using 105-th order differential which is a 3-round extension of the 6-round one. If we use it, instead of 112-th order differential, using the meet-in-the-middle attack technique for higher order differential table, the data and computational complexity for the attack to 14-round CLEFIA can be reduced to around 2-5, 2-34 of the conventional attack, respectively.

PEiD is a packer identification tool widely used for malware analysis but its accuracy is becoming lower and lower recently. There exist two major reasons for that. The first is that PEiD does not provide a way to create signatures, though it adopts a signature-based approach. We need to create signatures manually, and it is difficult to catch up with packers created or upgraded rapidly. The second is that PEiD utilizes exact matching. If a signature contains any error, PEiD cannot identify the packer that corresponds to the signature. In this paper, we propose a new automated packer identification method to overcome the limitations of PEiD and report the results of our numerical study. Our method applies string-kernel-based support vector machine (SVM): it can measure the similarity between packed programs without our operations such as manually creating signature and it provides some error tolerant mechanism that can significantly reduce detection failure caused by minor signature violations. In addition, we use the byte sequence starting from the entry point of a packed program as a packer's feature given to SVM. That is, our method combines the advantages from signature-based approach and machine learning (ML) based approach. The numerical results on 3902 samples with 26 packer classes and 3 unpacked (not-packed) classes shows that our method achieves a high accuracy of 99.46% outperforming PEiD and an existing ML-based method that Sun et al. have proposed.

In this paper, we investigate how to achieve call admission control (CAC) for guaranteeing call dropping probability QoS which is caused by handoff timeout in cognitive radio (CR) networks. When primary user (PU) appears, spectrum handoff should be initiated to maintain secondary user (SU)'s link. We propose a novel virtual queuing (VQ) scheme to schedule spectrum handoff requests sent by multiple SUs. Unlike the conventional first-come-first-served (FCFS) scheduling, resuming transmission in the original channel has higher priority than switching to another channel. It costs less because it avoids the cost of signaling frequent spectrum switches. We characterize the handoff delay on the effect of PU's behavior and the number of SUs in CR networks. And user capacity under certain QoS requirement is derived as a guideline for CAC. The analytical results show that call dropping performance can be greatly improved by CAC when a large amount of SUs arrives fast as well as the VQ scheme is verified to reduce handoff cost compared to existing methods.

A macroscopic structure was analyzed for a system comprising multiple elements in which the dynamics is affected by their distribution. First, a nonlinear Boltzmann equation, which has an integration term with respect to the distribution of the elements, was derived. Next, the moment vector equation (MVE) for the Boltzmann equation was derived. The average probability density function (pdf) in a steady state was derived using eigen analysis of the coefficient matrix of the MVE. The macroscopic structure of the system and the mechanism that provides the average pdf and the transient response were then analyzed using eigen analysis. Evaluation of the average pdf and transient response showed that using eigen analysis is effective for analyzing not only the transient and stationary properties of the system but also the macroscopic structure and the mechanism providing the properties.

Multivariate Public Key Cryptosystems (MPKC) are candidates for post-quantum cryptography. Rainbow is a digital signature scheme in MPKC, whose signature generation and verification are relatively efficient. However, the security of MPKC depends on the difficulty in solving a system of multivariate polynomials, and the key length of MPKC becomes substantially large compared with that of RSA cryptosystems for the same level of security. The size of the secret and public keys in MPKC has been reduced in previous research. The NC-Rainbow is a signature scheme in MPKC, which was proposed in order to reduce the size of secret key of Rainbow. So far, several attacks against NC-Rainbow have been proposed. In this paper, we summarize attacks against NC-Rainbow, containing attacks against the original Rainbow, and analyze the total security of NC-Rainbow. Based on the cryptanalysis, we estimate the security parameter of NC-Rainbow at the several security level.

In the shadow theory, a new description and a physical mean at a low grazing limit of incidence on gratings in the two dimensional scattering problem have been discussed. In this paper, by applying the shadow theory to the three dimensional problem of multilayered dielectric periodic gratings, we formulate the oblique primary excitation and introduce the scattering factors through our analytical method, by use of the matrix eigenvalues. In terms of the scattering factors, the diffraction efficiencies are defined for propagating and evanescent waves with linearly and circularly polarized incident waves. Numerical examples show that when an incident angle becomes low grazing, only specular reflection occurs with the reflection coefficient -1, regardless of the incident polarization. It is newly found that in a circularly polarized incidence case, the same circularly polarized wave as the incident wave is specularly reflected at a low grazing limit.

Recently, small cell systems such as femto cell are being considered as a good alternative that can support the increasing demand for mobile data traffic because they can significantly enhance network capacity by increasing spatial reuse. In this paper, we analyze the coverage and capacity of a femto cell when it is deployed in a hotspot to reduce the traffic loads of neighboring macro base stations (BSs). Our analysis results show that the coverage and capacity of femto cell are seriously affected by surrounding signal environment and they can be greatly enhanced by adapting power allocation for channels to the surrounding environment. Thus, we propose an adaptive power partitioning scheme where power allocation for channels can be dynamically adjusted to suit the environment surrounding the femto cell. In addition, we numerically derive the optimal power allocation ratio for channels to optimize the performance of the femto cell in the proposed scheme. It is shown that the proposed scheme with the optimal channel power allocation significantly outperforms the conventional scheme with fixed power allocation for channels.

1+1 protection provides instantaneous proactive recovery from any single link failure by duplicating and sending the same source data onto two disjoint paths. Other resource efficient recovery techniques to deal with single link failure require switching operations at least at both ends, which restrict instantaneous recovery. However, the 1+1 protection technique demands at least double network resources. Our goal is to minimize the resources required for 1+1 protection while maintaining the advantage of instantaneous recovery. It was reported that the network coding (NC) technique reduces resource utilization in 1+1 protection, and in order to determine an optimum NC aware set of routes that minimizes the required network resources for 1+1 protection, an Integer Quadratic Programming (IQP) formulation has already been addressed. Solving an IQP problem requires large amount of memory (cannot be determined exactly) and special algorithms by the mathematical programming solver. In this paper our contributions consist of two parts. First, we formulate the optimization problem, corresponding to the IQP model, as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation, which is solvable by any linear programming solver, and so its memory and time requirements are smaller. However, the presented ILP model works well in small-scale and medium-scale networks, but fails to support large-scale networks due to excessive memory requirements and calculation time. Second, to deal with these issues, a heuristic algorithm is proposed to determine the best possible NC aware set of routes in large-scale networks. Numerical results show that our strategies achieve almost double the resource saving effect than the conventional minimal-cost routing policy in the examined medium-scale and large scale networks.

We analyzed polarization characteristics of gammadion-shaped planar chiral nano-gratings (PCNGs), using Jones matrix and FDTD simulation. Optical activity (OA) was found to take place at wavelengths where long-lifetime modes appeared in the chiral layer. Among two kinds of resonance phenomena that concern the extension of the lifetime, guided-mode resonance and Fabry-Perot resonance, the latter was found to be a key to generate practically-important, broad peaks in the OA spectrum. Through the calculation of dispersion relations of Bloch modes in the chiral layer, we showed that the interference of multiple modes with group velocity dispersion played a critical role in the generation of such long-lifetime modes.

In this paper, a priority control problem between uplink and downlink flows in IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs is considered. The minimum contention window size (CWmin) has a nonnegative integer value. CWmin control scheme is one of the solutions for priority control to achieve the fairness between links. However, it has the problem that CWmin control scheme cannot achieve precise priority control when the CWmin values become small. As the solution of this problem, this paper proposes a new CWmin control method called a virtual continuous CWmin control (VCCC) scheme. The key concept of this method is that it involves the use of small and large CWmin values probabilistically. The proposed scheme realizes the expected value of CWmin as a nonnegative real number and solves the precise priority control problem. Moreover, we proposed a theoretical analysis model for the proposed VCCC scheme. Computer simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves the throughput performance and achieves fairness between the uplink and the downlink flows in an infrastructure mode of the IEEE 802.11 based wireless LAN. Throughput of the proposed scheme is 31% higher than that of a conventional scheme when the number of wireless stations is 18. The difference between the theoretical analysis results and computer simulation results of the throughput is within 1% when the number of STAs is less than 10.

In modern hardware security applications, silicon physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are of interest for their potential use as a unique identity or secret key that is generated from inherent characteristics caused by process variations. However, arbiter-based PUFs utilizing the relative delay-time difference between equivalent paths have a security issue in which the generated challenge-response pairs (CRPs) can be predicted by a machine learning attack. We previously proposed the RG-DTM PUF, in which a response is decided from divided time domains allocated to response 0 or 1, to improve the uniqueness of the conventional arbiter-PUF in a small circuit. However, its resistance against machine learning attacks has not yet been studied. In this paper, we evaluate the resistance against machine learning attacks by using a support vector machine (SVM) and logistic regression (LR) in both simulations and measurements and compare the RG-DTM PUF with the conventional arbiter-PUF and with the XOR arbiter-PUF, which strengthens the resistance by using XORing output from multiple arbiter-PUFs. In numerical simulations, prediction rates using both SVM and LR were above 90% within 1,000 training CRPs on the arbiter-PUF. The machine learning attack using the SVM could never predict responses on the XOR arbiter-PUF with over six arbiter-PUFs, whereas the prediction rate eventually reached 95% using the LR and many training CRPs. On the RG-DTM PUF, when the division number of the time domains was over eight, the prediction rates using the SVM were equal to the probability by guess. The machine learning attack using LR has the potential to predict responses, although an adversary would need to steal a significant amount of CRPs. However, the resistance can exponentially be strengthened with an increase in the division number, just like with the XOR arbiter-PUF. Over one million CRPs are required to attack the 16-divided RG-DTM PUF. Differences between the RG-DTM PUF and the XOR arbiter-PUF relate to the area penalty and the power penalty. Specifically, the XOR arbiter-PUF has to make up for resistance against machine learning attacks by increasing the circuit area, while the RG-DTM PUF is resistant against machine learning attacks with less area penalty and power penalty since only capacitors are added to the conventional arbiter-PUF. We also attacked RG-DTM PUF chips, which were fabricated with 0.18-µm CMOS technology, to evaluate the effect of physical variations and unstable responses. The resistance against machine learning attacks was related to the delay-time difference distribution, but unstable responses had little influence on the attack results.

A removable HDD “iVDR” is an international standardized medium, which has HDD features such as a large capacity and high-speed data transfer, and also is removable and compatible. We discuss the concepts of the hardware-specifications designed by the iVDR Consortium and the history of the international standardization activities for iVDR. We also discuss application expansions through these standardization activities.

Pieces of personal information, such as personal names and relationships, are crucial in text mining applications. Obituaries are good sources for this kind of information. This study proposes an effective method for extracting various facts about people from obituary Web pages. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves high performance in terms of recall and precision.

Pseudo Power Gating (Pseudo PG) is one of gate level power reduction methods for combinational circuits by stopping unnecessary input changes of gates. In Pseudo PG, an extra control signal might be added to a gate and other input changes of the gate are deactivated when the control signal takes the controlling value. To improve the power reduction capability, the paper newly introduces dual-stage Pseudo PG with advanced clustering algorithm where up to two extra control signals are added to a gate if effective. The advanced clustering algorithm selects the first control signal to be compatible with the second control signal based on the propagation of controlling condition via a path, with which candidates of controllable gates excluded by the maximum depth constraint can be controlled. Experimental results show that the proposed dual-stage Pseudo PG method has obtained 23.23% average power reduction with 5.28% delay penalty with respect to the original circuits, and has obtained 10.46% more power reduction with 2.75% delay penalty compared with respect to circuits applying the original single-stage Pseudo PG.

The objective of this research is to design a high-performance NAND flash memory system with a data buffer. The proposed buffer system in the NAND flash memory consists of two parts, i.e., a fully associative temporal buffer for temporal locality and a fully associative spatial buffer for spatial locality. We propose a new operating mechanism for reducing overhead of flash memory, that is, erase and write operations. According to our simulation results, the proposed buffer system can reduce the write and erase operations by about 73% and 79% for spec application respectively, compared with a fully associative buffer with two times more space. Futhermore, the average memory access time can improve by about 60% compared with other large buffer systems.

In this paper, we propose a synthesizable LDPC decoder IP core for the WiMAX system with high parallelism and enhanced error-correcting performance. By taking the advantages of both layered scheduling and fully-parallel architecture, the decoder can fully support multi-mode decoding specified in WiMAX with the parallelism much higher than commonly used partial-parallel layered LDPC decoder architecture. 6-bit quantized messages are split into bit-serial style and 2bit-width serial processing lines work concurrently so that only 3 cycles are required to decode one layer. As a result, 12∼24 cycles are enough to process one iteration for all the code-rates specified in WiMAX. Compared to our previous bit-serial decoder, it doubles the parallelism and solves the message saturation problem of the bit-serial arithmetic, with minor gate count increase. Power synthesis result shows that the proposed decoder achieves 5.83pJ/bit/iteration energy efficiency which is 46.8% improvement compared to state-of-the-art work. Furthermore, an advanced dynamic quantization (ADQ) technique is proposed to enhance the error-correcting performance in layered decoder architecture. With about 2% area overhead, 6-bit ADQ can achieve the error-correcting performance close to 7-bit fixed quantization with improved error floor performance.

In this paper, we propose a rectangular weighting function that can be used in the method of iteratively reweighted least squares (IRWLS) for designing equiripple all-pass IIR filters. The purpose of introducing this weighting function is to improve the convergence performance in the solution of the IRWLS. The height of each rectangle is designed to be equal to the local maximum of each ripple, and the width of each rectangle is designed so that the area of each rectangle becomes equal to the area of each ripple. Here, the ripple is the absolute value of the phase error. We show experimentally that the convergence performance in the solution of the IRWLS can be improved by using the proposed weighting function.

Spatially coupled (SC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are defined by bipartite graphs that are obtained by assembling prototype graphs. The combination and connection of prototype graphs are designated by specifying some parameters, and Kudekar et al. showed that BP threshold of the ensemble of SC LDPC codes agrees with MAP threshold of the ensemble of regular LDPC codes when those parameters are grown up so that the code length tends to infinity. When we design SC LDPC codes with practical code length, however, it is not clear how to set those parameters to enhance the performance of SC LDPC codes. In this paper, we provide the result of numerical experiments that suggest the dependence of error performance of SC LDPC codes over BEC on their design parameters.