In this paper, we use frequency-domain equalization (FDE) to create coherent optical single-carrier (CO-SC) transmission systems that are very tolerant of chromatic dispersion (CD) and polarization mode dispersion (PMD). The efficient transmission of a 25-Gb/s NRZ-QPSK signal by using the proposed FDE is demonstrated under severe CD and PMD conditions. We also discuss the principle of FDE and some techniques suitable for implementing CO-SC-FDE. The results show that a CO-SC-FDE system is very tolerant of CD and PMD and can achieve high transmission rates over single mode fiber without optical dispersion compensation.

This paper proposes new techniques to simulate a MIMO propagation channel using the ray-tracing method for the purpose of decreasing the computational complexity. These techniques simulate a MIMO propagation channel by substituting the propagation path between a particular combination of transmitter and receiver antennas for all combinations of transmitter and receiver antennas. The estimation accuracy calculated using the proposed techniques is evaluated based on comparison to the results calculated using imaging algorithms. The results show that the proposed techniques simulate a MIMO propagation channel with low computational complexity, and a high level of estimation accuracy is achieved using the proposed Vector-Rotation Approximation technique compared to that for the imaging algorithm.

Carbon nanofibers (CNFs) were fabricated on graphite plates using "Ar+ ion sputtering method" in large amount at room temperature. The morphology of CNFs was controlled by a simultaneous carbon supply during ion sputtering. CNF-tipped cones were formed on graphite plate surfaces without carbon supply whereas those with a simultaneous carbon supply featured mainly needle-like protrusions of large size. The field electron emission (FE) properties, measured using parallel plate configurations in 10-4 Pa range, showed the threshold fields of 4.4 and 5.2 V/µm with a current density of 1 µA/cm2 for CNF-tipped cones and needle-like protrusion, respectively. Reliability test results indicated that CNF-tipped cones were more stable than needle-like protrusion. The morphological change after reliability test showed a so-called "self-regenerative" process and structure damage for CNF-tipped cones and needle-like protrusions, respectively.

In recent years, there have been many studies on integrating a number of heterogeneous wireless networks into one network by establishing standards like IEEE 802.16. For this purpose, the base station (BS) should allocate the appropriate bandwidth to each connection with a network scheduler. In wireless networks, the signal to noise ratio (SNR) changes with time due to many factors such as fading. Hence, we estimate the SNR based on the error rate reflecting wireless network condition. Using the estimated SNR, we propose a new time slot allocation algorithm so that the proposed algorithm guarantees the delay requirement and full link utilization.

A filter integrated antenna configuration that suppresses the coupling signal from the transmitter (Tx) to receiver (Rx) base station antenna is investigated. We propose an aperture coupled patch antenna with multiple trapezoidal elements installed on the substrate of the Rx antenna between the radiation and feed layers in order to increase the bandwidth in the Rx band while maintaining low mutual coupling in the Tx band. The mutual coupling characteristics and the fractional bandwidth of the Rx antenna are presented as functions of the shape and width of the trapezoidal elements.

A variety of ZnO belt-like structures were synthesized by the heat treatment of ZnS substrates with Ga droplets in the air, and their morphological and structural properties were investigated. Three types of ZnO belts with flat surfaces of (20), (100) and (23) were obtained. As comparison, the ZnO crystal growth was examined by the thermal oxidation of ZnS only. These results highlight the promise of the heat treatment with Ga in the synthesis of oxide nanostructures.

This paper presents a measurement method for determining effective conductivity of copper-clad dielectric laminate substrates in the millimeter-wave region. The conductivity is indirectly evaluated from measured resonant frequencies and unloaded Q values of a number of Whispering Gallery modes excited in a circular disk sample, which consists of a copper-clad dielectric substrate with a large diameter of 20-30 wavelengths. We can, therefore, obtain easily the frequency dependence of the effective conductivity of the sample under test in a wide range of frequency at once. Almost identical conductivity is predicted for two kinds of WG resonators (the copper-clad type and the sandwich type) with different field distribution; it is self-consistent and provides the important foundation for the method if not for the alternative method at this moment. We measure three kinds of copper foils in 55-65 GHz band, where the conductivity of electrodeposited copper foil is smaller than that of rolled copper foil and shiny-both-sides copper foil. The measured conductivity for the electrodeposited copper foil decreases with an increase in the frequency. The transmission losses measured for microstrip lines which are fabricated from these substrates are accurately predicted with the conductivity evaluated by this method.

This paper presents an extended Relief-F algorithm for nominal attribute estimation, for application to small-document classification. Relief algorithms are general and successful instance-based feature-filtering algorithms for data classification and regression. Many improved Relief algorithms have been introduced as solutions to problems of redundancy and irrelevant noisy features and to the limitations of the algorithms for multiclass datasets. However, these algorithms have only rarely been applied to text classification, because the numerous features in multiclass datasets lead to great time complexity. Therefore, in considering their application to text feature filtering and classification, we presented an extended Relief-F algorithm for numerical attribute estimation (E-Relief-F) in 2007. However, we found limitations and some problems with it. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce additional problems with Relief algorithms for text feature filtering, including the negative influence of computation similarities and weights caused by a small number of features in an instance, the absence of nearest hits and misses for some instances, and great time complexity. We then suggest a new extended Relief-F algorithm for nominal attribute estimation (E-Relief-Fd) to solve these problems, and we apply it to small text-document classification. We used the algorithm in experiments to estimate feature quality for various datasets, its application to classification, and its performance in comparison with existing Relief algorithms. The experimental results show that the new E-Relief-Fd algorithm offers better performance than previous Relief algorithms, including E-Relief-F.

This paper proposes a method for handling out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words that cannot be translated using conventional phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT) systems. For a given OOV word, lexical approximation techniques are utilized to identify spelling and inflectional word variants that occur in the training data. All OOV words in the source sentence are then replaced with appropriate word variants found in the training corpus, thus reducing the number of OOV words in the input. Moreover, in order to increase the coverage of such word translations, the SMT translation model is extended by adding new phrase translations for all source language words that do not have a single-word entry in the original phrase-table but only appear in the context of larger phrases. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is investigated for the translation of Hindi to English, Chinese, and Japanese.

Adjustment of a certain parameter in the course of performing a trajectory task such as drawing or gesturing is a common manipulation in pen-based interaction. Since pen tip information is confined to x-y coordinate data, such concurrent parameter adjustment is not easily accomplished in devices using only a pen tip. This paper comparatively investigates the performance of inherent pen input modalities (Pressure, Tilt, Azimuth, and Rolling) and Key Pressing with the non-preferred hand used for precision parameter manipulation during pen sliding actions. We elaborate our experimental design framework here and conduct experimentation to evaluate the effect of the five techniques. Results show that Pressure enabled the fastest performance along with the lowest error rate, while Azimuth exhibited the worst performance. Tilt showed slightly faster performance and achieved a lower error rate than Rolling. However, Rolling achieved the most significant learning effect on Selection Time and was favored over Tilt in subjective evaluations. Our experimental results afford a general understanding of the performance of inherent pen input modalities in the course of a trajectory task in HCI (human computer interaction).

The key problem of object-based attention is the definition of objects, while contour grouping methods aim at detecting the complete boundaries of objects in images. In this paper, we develop a new contour grouping method which shows several characteristics. First, it is guided by the global saliency information. By detecting multiple boundaries in a hierarchical way, we actually construct an object-based attention model. Second, it is optimized by the grouping cost, which is decided both by Gestalt cues of directed tangents and by region saliency. Third, it gives a new definition of Gestalt cues for tangents which includes image information as well as tangent information. In this way, we can improve the robustness of our model against noise. Experiment results are shown in this paper, with a comparison against other grouping model and space-based attention model.

In this paper, we propose a bandwidth-scalable stereo audio coding method based on a layered structure. The proposed stereo coding method encodes super-wideband (SWB) stereo signals and is able to decode either wideband (WB) stereo signals or SWB stereo signals, depending on the network congestion. The performance of the proposed stereo coding method is then compared with that of a conventional stereo coding method that separately decodes WB or SWB stereo signals, in terms of subjective quality, algorithmic delay, and computational complexity. Experimental results show that when stereo audio signals sampled at a rate of 32 kHz are compressed to 64 kbit/s, the proposed method provides significantly better audio quality with a 64-sample shorter algorithmic delay, and comparable computational complexity.

We study the online file allocation problem on ring networks. In this paper, we present a 7-competitive randomized algorithm against an adaptive online adversary on uniform cactus graphs. The algorithm is deterministic if the file size is 1. Moreover, we obtain lower bounds of 4.25 and 3.833 for a deterministic algorithm and a randomized algorithm against an adaptive online adversary, respectively, on ring networks.

We propose a video ontology system to overcome semantic gap in video retrieval. The proposed video ontology is aimed at bridging of the gap between the semantic nature of user queries and raw video contents. Also, results of semantic retrieval shows not only the concept of topic keyword but also a sub-concept of the topic keyword using semantic query extension. Through this process, recall is likely to provide high accuracy results in our method. The experiments compared with keyframe-based indexing have demonstrated that this proposed scene-based indexing presents better results in several kinds of videos.

We propose a method of assigning polarity to causal information extracted from Japanese financial articles concerning business performance of companies. Our method assigns polarity (positive or negative) to causal information in accordance with business performance, e.g. "zidousya no uriage ga koutyou: (Sales of cars are good)" (The polarity positive is assigned in this example). We may use causal expressions assigned polarity by our method, e.g., to analyze content of articles concerning business performance circumstantially. First, our method classifies articles concerning business performance into positive articles and negative articles. Using them, our method assigns polarity (positive or negative) to causal information extracted from the set of articles concerning business performance. Although our method needs training dataset for classifying articles concerning business performance into positive and negative ones, our method does not need a training dataset for assigning polarity to causal information. Hence, even if causal information not appearing in the training dataset for classifying articles concerning business performance into positive and negative ones exist, our method is able to assign it polarity by using statistical information of this classified sets of articles. We evaluated our method and confirmed that it attained 74.4% precision and 50.4% recall of assigning polarity positive, and 76.8% precision and 61.5% recall of assigning polarity negative, respectively.

This paper proposes a micro-code based Programmable Memory BIST (PMBIST) architecture that can support various kinds of test algorithms. The proposed Non-linear PMBIST (NPMBIST) guarantees high flexibility and high fault coverage using not only March algorithms but also non-linear algorithms such as Walking and Galloping. This NPMBIST has an optimized hardware overhead, since algorithms can be implemented with the minimum bits by the optimized instructions. Finally, various and complex algorithms can be run thanks to its support of multi-loop.

Scalable video coding (SVC) was standardized as an extension of H.264/AVC by the JVT (Joint Video Team) in Nov. 2007. The biggest feature of SVC is multi-layered coding where two or more video sequences are compressed into a single bit-stream. This letter proposes a fast block mode decision algorithm in spatial enhancement layer of SVC. The proposed algorithm achieves early decision by limiting the number of candidate modes for block with certain characteristic called same motion vector block (SMVB). Our proposed method reduces the complexity, in terms of encoding time by up to 66.17%. Nevertheless, it shows negligible PSNR degradation by only up to 0.16 dB and increases the bit-rate by only up to 0.64%, respectively.

We investigate per-flow flit and packet worst-case delay bounds in on-chip wormhole networks. Such investigation is essential in order to provide guarantees under worst-case conditions in cost-constrained systems, as required by many hard real-time embedded applications. We first propose analysis models for flow control, link and buffer sharing. Based on these analysis models, we obtain an open-ended service analysis model capturing the combined effect of flow control, link and buffer sharing. With the service analysis model, we compute equivalent service curves for individual flows, and then derive their flit and packet delay bounds. Our experimental results verify that our analytical bounds are correct and tight.

We investigated the relationship between ambient illumination and psychological effect by applying a modified color harmony model. We verified the proposed model by analyzing correlation between psychological value and modified color harmony score. Experimental results showed the possibility to obtain the best color for illumination using this model.

Traditional algorithms for dynamic OFDMA resource allocation have relatively deterministic system capacity and user fairness. Thus, in this letter, an efficient scheme is proposed to flexibly adjust quality-of-service for users, which is achieved by appropriately setting minimum data-rate of each user.