Traditionally, popular synonym acquisition methods are based on the distributional hypothesis, and a metric such as Jaccard coefficients is used to evaluate the similarity between the contexts of words to obtain synonyms for a query. On the other hand, when one tries to compile and clean a thesaurus, one often already has a modest number of synonym relations at hand. Could something be done with a half-built thesaurus alone? We propose the use of spectral methods and discuss their relation to other network-based algorithms in natural language processing (NLP), such as PageRank and Bootstrapping. Since compiling a thesaurus is very laborious, we believe that adding the proposed method to the toolkit of thesaurus constructors would significantly ease the pain in accomplishing this task.

In this paper, an ultra low power analog front-end for EPCglobal Class 1 Generation 2 RFID tag is presented. The proposed RFID tag removes the need for high frequency clock and counters used in conventional tags, which are the most power hungry blocks. The proposed clock-free decoder employs an analog integrator with an adaptive current source that provides a uniform decoding margin regardless of the data rate and a link frequency extractor based on a relaxation oscillator that generates frequency used for backscattering. A dual supply voltage scheme is also employed to increase the power efficiency of the tag. In order to improve the tolerance of the proposed circuit to environmental variations, a self-calibration circuit is proposed. The proposed RFID analog front-end circuit is designed and simulated in 0.25 µm CMOS, which shows that the power consumption is reduced by an order magnitude compared to the conventional RFID tags, without losing immunity to environmental variations.

This paper describes non-reference objective quality evaluation for noise-reduced speech. First, a subjective test is conducted in accordance with ITU-T Rec. P.835 to obtain the speech quality, the noise quality, and the overall quality of noise-reduced speech. Based on the results, we then propose an overall quality estimation model. The unique point of the proposed model is that the estimation of the overall quality is done only using the previously estimated speech quality and noise quality, in contrast to conventional models, which utilize the acoustical features extracted. Finally, we propose a non-reference objective quality evaluation method using the proposed model. The results of an experiment with different noise reduction algorithms and noise types confirmed that the proposed method gives more accurate estimates of the overall quality compared with the method described in ITU-T Rec. P.563.

A diversity scheme with Fractional Sampling (FS) in an OFDM receiver has been investigated recently. Through FS, it is possible to separate multipath components and obtain diversity gain in OFDM systems. Enlargement of the bandwidth of the total frequency response between transmit and receive baseband filters allows the FS scheme to achieve path diversity. However, the transmit filter has to be designed according to the spectrum mask of the wireless standards such as IEEE802.11a/g to avoid interference to the other communication systems and the frequency response of the composite channel including the transmit and receive filters has often been set to minimal bandwidth to eliminate adjacent channel signals. In order to achieve the maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the same filter is commonly used in the transmitter and the receiver. In this paper, the trade-off among the SNR deterioration, adjacent channel interference, and the diversity gain due to the enlargement of the bandwidth of the receive filter is investigated. Numerical results from computer simulations indicate that the BER performance with wider bandwidth in the receiver shows better performance than that with the minimal bandwidth for maximizing the SNR in certain conditions.

An arbitrary noise generator (ANG) is based on time-series charging of divided parasitic capacitance (TSDPC) and emulates power supply noise generation in a CMOS digital circuit. A prototype ANG incorporates an array of 32 x 32 6-bit TSDPC cells along with a 128-word vector memory and occupies 2 x 2 mm2 in a 65 nm 1.2 V CMOS technology. Digital noise emulation of functional logic cores such as register arrays is demonstrated with chip-level waveform monitoring at power supply, ground, as well as substrate nodes.

There is evidence in favor of a relationship between the presence of 1/f noise and computational universality in cellular automata. To confirm the relationship, we search for two-dimensional cellular automata with a 1/f power spectrum by means of genetic algorithms. The power spectrum is calculated from the evolution of the state of the cell, starting from a random initial configuration. The fitness is estimated by the power spectrum with consideration of the spectral similarity to the 1/f spectrum. The result shows that the rule with the highest fitness over the most runs exhibits a 1/f type spectrum and its transition function and behavior are quite similar to those of the Game of Life, which is known to be a computationally universal cellular automaton. These results support the relationship between the presence of 1/f noise and computational universality.

In this paper, we propose an optimization system with parallel processing for reducing electromagnetic interference (EMI) on electronic control unit (ECU). We adopt simulated annealing (SA), genetic algorithm (GA) and taboo search (TS) to seek optimal solutions, and a Spice-like circuit simulator to analyze common-mode current. Therefore, the proposed system can determine the adequate combinations of the parasitic inductance and capacitance values on printed circuit board (PCB) efficiently and practically, to reduce EMI caused by the common-mode current. Finally, we apply the proposed system to an example circuit to verify the validity and efficiency of the system.

An on-chip process, supply voltage, and temperature (PVT) compensation technique for low-voltage CMOS digital circuits was proposed. Because the degradation of circuit performance originates from the variation of the saturation current in transistors, we developed a compensation circuit consisting of a reference current that is independent of PVT variations. The circuit is operated so that the saturation current in digital circuits is equal to the reference current. The operations of the circuit were confirmed by SPICE simulation with a set of 0.35-µm standard CMOS parameters. Monte Carlo simulations showed that the proposed technique effectively improves circuit performance by 71%. The circuit is useful for on-chip compensation to mitigate the degradation of circuit performance with PVT variation in low-voltage digital circuits.

A Peer-To-Peer (P2P) application uses an overlay network which is a virtual network constructed over the physical network. Traditional overlay construction methods do not take physical location of nodes into consideration, resulting in a large amount of redundant traffic. Some proximity-aware construction methods have been proposed to address this problem. These methods typically connect nearby nodes in the physical network. However, as the number of nodes increases, the path length of a route between two distant nodes rapidly increases. To alleviate this problem, we propose a technique which can be incorporated in existing overlay construction methods. The idea behind this technique is to employ long links to directly connect distant nodes. Through simulation experiments, we show that using our proposed technique, networks can achieve small path length and low communication cost while maintaining high resiliency to failures.

A swing level controlled voltage-mode transmitter is proposed to support a stub series-terminated logic channel with center-tapped termination. This transmitter provides a swing level control to support the diagnostic mode and improve the signal integrity in the absence of the destination termination. By using the variable parallel termination, the proposed transmitter maintains the constant output impedance of the source termination while the swing level is controlled. Also, the series termination using an external resistor is used to reduce the impedance mismatch effect due to the parasitic components of the capacitor and inductor. To verify the proposed transmitter, the voltage-mode driver, which provides eight swing levels with the constant output impedance of about 50 Ω, was implemented using a 70 nm 1-poly 3-metal DRAM process with a 1.5 V supply. The jitter reduction of 54% was measured with the swing level controlled voltage-mode driver in the absence of the destination termination at 1.6-Gb/s.

For an arbitrary set B of Boolean functions satisfying a certain condition, we give a general method of constructing a class CB of read-once Boolean formulas over the basis B that has the following property: For any F in CB, F can be transformed to an optimal formula (i.e., a simplest formula over the standard basis {AND, OR, NOT}) by replacing each occurrence of a basis function h ∈ B in F with an optimal formula for h. For a particular set of basis functions B* = {AND,OR,NOT,XOR,MUX}, we give a canonical form representation for CB* so that the set of canonical form formulas consists of only NPN-representatives in CB*.

In the area of wireless sensor networks, the efficient spatial query processing based on the locations of sensor nodes is required. Especially, spatial queries on two sensor networks need a distributed spatial join processing among the sensor networks. Because the distributed spatial join processing causes lots of wireless transmissions in accessing sensor nodes of two sensor networks, our goal of this paper is to reduce the wireless transmissions for the energy efficiency of sensor nodes. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient distributed spatial join algorithm on two heterogeneous sensor networks, which performs in-network spatial join processing. To optimize the in-network processing, we also propose a Grid-based Rectangle tree (GR-tree) and a grid-based approximation function. The GR-tree reduces the wireless transmissions by supporting a distributed spatial search for sensor nodes. The grid-based approximation function reduces the wireless transmissions by reducing the volume of spatial query objects which should be pushed down to sensor nodes. Finally, we compare naive and existing approaches through extensive experiments and clarify our approach's distinguished features.

In digital signal processing, the sampling theorem states that any real valued function f can be reconstructed from a sequence of values of f that are discretely sampled with a frequency at least twice as high as the maximum frequency of the spectrum of f. This theorem can also be applied to functions over finite domain. Then, the range of frequencies of f can be expressed in more detail by using a bounded set instead of the maximum frequency. A function whose range of frequencies is confined to a bounded set is referred to as bandlimited function. And a sampling theorem for bandlimited functions over Boolean domain has been obtained. Here, it is important to obtain a sampling theorem for bandlimited functions not only over Boolean domain (GF(2)n domain) but also over GF(q)n domain, where q is a prime power and GF(q) is Galois field of order q. For example, in experimental designs, although the model can be expressed as a linear combination of the Fourier basis functions and the levels of each factor can be represented by GF(q), the number of levels often take a value greater than two. However, the sampling theorem for bandlimited functions over GF(q)n domain has not been obtained. On the other hand, the sampling points are closely related to the codewords of a linear code. However, the relation between the parity check matrix of a linear code and any distinct error vectors has not been obtained, although it is necessary for understanding the meaning of the sampling theorem for bandlimited functions. In this paper, we generalize the sampling theorem for bandlimited functions over Boolean domain to a sampling theorem for bandlimited functions over GF(q)n domain. We also present a theorem for the relation between the parity check matrix of a linear code and any distinct error vectors. Lastly, we clarify the relation between the sampling theorem for functions over GF(q)n domain and linear codes.

In this letter, we present a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) optimal combining (OC) scheme based on alternate iteration. With the channel state information (CSI) of co-channel interferers (CCIs), this algorithm can be used in flat fading and frequency selective channels to suppress CCIs. Compared with the optimal transceiver of MIMO maximal ratio combining (MRC) systems, results of simulation show that this scheme improves the uplink transmission performance significantly.

We propose a CMOS circuit that can be used as an equivalent to resistors. This circuit uses a simple differential pair with diode-connected MOSFETs and operates as a high-resistance resistor when driven in the subthreshold region of MOSFETs. Its resistance can be controlled in a range of 1-1000 MΩ by adjusting a tail current for the differential pair. The results of device fabrication with a 0.35-µm 2P-4M CMOS process technology is described. The resistance was 13 MΩ for a tail current of 10 nA and 135 MΩ for 1 nA. The chip area was 105 µm110 µm. Our resistor circuit is useful to construct many high-resistance resistors in a small chip area.

Automated bug localization is an important issue in software engineering. In the last few decades, various proactive and reactive localization approaches have been proposed to predict the fault-prone software modules. However, most proactive or reactive approaches need source code information or software complexity metrics to perform localization. In this paper, we propose a reactive approach which considers only bug report information and historical revision logs. In our approach, the co-location relationships among bug reports are explored to improve the prediction accuracy of a state-of-the-art learning method. Studies on three open source projects reveal that the proposed scheme can consistently improve the prediction accuracy in all three software projects by nearly 11.6% on average.

A novel turbo coded modulation scheme, called the turbo-APPM, for deep space optical communications is proposed. The proposed turbo-APPM is a serial concatenation of turbo codes, an accumulator and a pulse position modulation (PPM), where turbo codes act as an outer code while the accumulator and the PPM act together as an inner code. The generator polynomial and the puncturing rule for generating turbo codes are chosen to lower the bit error rate. At the receiver, the joint iterative decoding is performed between the inner decoder and the outer turbo decoder. In the outer decoder, local iterative decoding for turbo codes is conducted. Simulation results are presented showing that the proposed turbo-APPM outperforms all previously proposed schemes such as LDPC-APPM, RS-PPM and SCPPM reported in the literature.

A new adaptive algorithm is proposed by introducing some modifications to the recursive least squares (RLS) algorithm. Except for the noise variance, the proposed algorithm does not require any statistics or knowledge of the desired signal, thus, it is suitable for adaptive filtering for channel estimation in code division multiple access (CDMA) systems in cases where the standard RLS approach cannot be used. A theoretical analysis demonstrates the convergence of the proposed algorithm, and simulation results for CDMA channel estimation show that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing channel estimation schemes.

In this paper, an efficient radio resource allocation scheme for OFDMA systems is proposed, which follows two steps to take care of real-time traffic characterized with multi-level delay constraints. Urgent packets, those with imminent deadlines, are released first in step 1. After that the remaining channel resources are managed in such a way that overall throughput is maximized at Step 2. In this work, 2-dimensional diversity over multiple sub-bands and multiple users are jointly considered. The proposed scheme is compared with existing schemes designed for real-time traffic such as Exponential Scheduling (EXP) scheme, Modified Largest Weighted Delay First (M-LWDF) scheme, and Round robin scheme in terms of the packet discard probability and throughput. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme performs much better than the aforementioned ones in terms of the packet discard probability, while slightly better in terms of throughput.

In a society preoccupied with gradual erosion of electronic privacy, loss of privacy in the current Domain Name System is an important issue worth considering. In this paper, we first review the DNS and some security & privacy threats to make average users begin to concern about the significance of privacy preservation in DNS protocols. Then, by an careful survey of four noise query generation based existing privacy protection approaches, we analyze some benefits and limitations of these proposals in terms of both related performance evaluation results and theoretic proofs. Finally, we point out some problems that still exist for research community's continuing efforts in the future.