This paper deals with the statistical modeling of a Time-Frequency Series of Speech (TFSS), obtained by Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) analysis of the speech signal picked up by a linear microphone array with two elements. We have attempted to find closer match between the distribution of the TFSS and theoretical distributions like Laplacian Distribution (LD), Gaussian Distribution (GD) and Generalized Gaussian Distribution (GGD) with parameters estimated from the TFSS data. It has been found that GGD provides the best models for real part, imaginary part and polar magnitudes of the time-series of the spectral components. The distribution of the polar magnitude is closer to LD than that of the real and imaginary parts. The distributions of the real and imaginary parts of TFSS correspond to strongly LD. The phase of the TFSS has been found uniformly distributed. The use of GGD based model as PDF in the fixed-point Frequency Domain Independent Component Analysis (FDICA) provides better separation performance and improves convergence speed significantly.

FEC (Forward Error Correction) can repair the damage to communication quality due to packet loss. The growing requirement of FEC for high-quality video transmission is inevitable on broadband networks. We have designed and implemented FEC, and integrated it to our developed video transmission system named "mpeg2ts." Our goal is to make it possible to deploy this system on the broadband Internet. However, the problem with constant redundancy of FEC is that weakness to fluctuation of network condition. To resolve this problem, in this paper, we propose and evaluate an efficient FEC method for high-quality video transmission. The proposed mechanisms can provide robustness as well as saving of processing load and optimization of bandwidth consumption. Moreover, we integrate it into a system to deploy it on the real broadband Internet. Transmission experiment demonstrates availability of developed system deployed on the network.

By means of the three-dimensional (3D) finite-difference time domain (FDTD) method, we have investigated in detail the optical properties of a two-dimensional photonic crystal (PC) surface-emitting laser having a square-lattice structure. The 3D-FDTD calculation is carried out for the finite size PC slab structure. The device is based on band-edge resonance, and plural band edges are present at the corresponding band edge point. For these band edges, we calculate the mode profile in the PC slab, far field pattern (FFP) and polarization mode of the surface-emitted component, and photon lifetime. FFPs are shown to be influenced by the finiteness of the structure. Quality (Q) factor, which is a dimensionless quantity representing photon lifetime, is introduced. The out-plane radiation loss in the direction normal to the PC plane greatly influences the total Q factor of resonant mode and is closely related with the band structure. As a result, Q factors clearly differ among these band edges. These results suggest that these band edges include resonant modes that are easy to lase and resonant modes that are difficult to lase.

Autonomous Decentralized Community Information System (ADCS) is a proposition made to meet the rapidly changing users' requirements and cope with the extreme dynamism in current information services. ADCS is a decentralized architecture that forms a community of individual end-users (community members) having the same interests and demands in specified time and location. It allows those members to mutually cooperate and share information without loading up any single node excessively. In this paper, an autonomous decentralized community communication technology is proposed to assure a productive cooperation, a flexible and timely communication among the community members. The main ideas behind this communication technology are: content-code communication (service-based) for flexibility and multilateral communication for timely and productive cooperation among members. All members communicate productively for the satisfaction of all the community members. The scalability of the system's response time regardless of the number of the community members is shown through simulation. Thus, the autonomous decentralized community communication technology reveals significant results when the total number of members in the community increases sharply.

Two-dimensional (2D) patterns of a conducting polymer have been prepared electrochemically. The patterns depend on the conditions of electrochemical polymerization. Concerning the polymerization reaction and the growth process of conducting polymers, it is found that the growth rate and solution flow during the generation of the 2D pattern are important factors for controlling the 2D pattern. The linear pattern and the simple branching pattern were successfully fabricated by optimizing the deposition conditions. The successful fabrication of the branching pattern indicates the processability of linear conducting polymers for network formation.

In this letter, we present an adaptive hopping technique for a wireless personal area network (WPAN) system employing a frequency hop spread spectrum (FH/SS). Analytical results based on the closed-form solutions for the aggregate throughput show that the proposed hopping algorithm using two defined hopping criteria is more friendly towards all kinds of interferers and gives an enhanced throughput with a moderate computational complexity.

In this paper we describe a method for the automated design of analog circuits. The method simultaneously sizes the different components (transistors, capacitors, etc.) in a pre-defined circuit topology and places them according to a pre-defined slicing tree. The method is based on formulating the circuit physical and electrical behavior in a special convex form. More specifically, we cast the design problem as a geometric program, a special type of convex optimization problem. Therefore, all design constraints are formulated as posynomial inequality or monomial equality constraints. Very efficient numerical algorithms are then used to solve the resulting geometric program and to create the design that meets the desired specifications. The formulation is hierarchical and modular, allowing easy topology re-use and process porting. The synthesis method is fast, and determines the globally optimal design; in particular the final solution is completely independent of the starting point, and infeasible specifications are unambiguously detected. After a brief overview of current analog design automation solutions, we describe our method and provide some design examples for op-amps and analog-to-digital converters.

A device structure for polymer Schottky diode, which has the glass chimney as a dopant reservoir enabling the reduction of series resistance without cathode corrosion, has been proposed. Doping with the acetonitrile solution of FeCl3 in the device resulted in the increase in the forward-bias current by one order of magnitude without notable increase in reverse-bias current, suggesting that the doping reduced the series resistance. It is found that the penetration speed depends on the solvents. Short time doping with the nitromethane solution of FeCl3 resulted in the increase by three orders of magnitude. However, doping for a long period yielded the considerable increase in the reverse-bias current due to the complete penetration of dopatn solution. When the upper opening of glass chimney of device is left opened and the sample after doping stored in air, the forward-bias current of the device reduced rapidly due to the undoping and/or degradation of polymer. It is possible to protect the degradation of device characteristics after doping, by sealing the chimney and storing the device in vacuum.

An optical fiber biosensor using adsorption LB films has been investigated for the application to the glucose detection in blood. The adsorption LB film containing glucose oxidase (GOD: the enzyme in human body) was deposited on the core portion of optical fiber and the variation of absorption spectra due to the reactions of GOD, glucose, and hemoglobin was measured. The relatively high response time of 60 s and glucose sensitivity as low as 20 mg/dl were obtained. The results demonstrate that the optical fiber bio-sensor using adsorption LB film can be used as a glucose sensor.

Recent new technologies of electro-mechanical conversion devices have been reviewed. Especially, the electrochemical properties of anisotropic actuators using polypyrrole have been reviewed in detailed and the realization of the bimorph (or bending beam) structure without artificial adhesive agent is introduced.

In this paper, a novel description method of the contour of a shape using extended fractal interpolation functions (EFIFs) is presented. Although the scope of application of traditional FIFs has been limited to cases in which a given signal is represented by a single-valued function, the EFIFs derived by the introduction of a new parameter can describe a multiple-valued signal such as the contour of a shape with a high level of accuracy. Furthermore, the proposed description method possesses the useful property that once a given contour has been modeled by the proposed description method, the shape can be easily expanded at an arbitrary expansion rate. Experimental results show the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed description method for representing contours.

We study relationships between the class of Boolean formulas called exclusive-or expansions based on monotone DNF formulas (MDNF formulas, for short) and the class of Horn DNF formulas. An MDNF formula f is a Boolean formula represented by f = f1fd , where f1 > > fd are monotone DNF formulas and no terms appear more than once. A Horn DNF formula is a DNF formula where each term contains at most one negative literal. We show that the class of double Horn functions, where both f and its negation can be represented by Horn DNF formulas, coincides with a subclass of MDNF formulas such that each DNF formula fi consists of a single term. Furthermore, we give an incrementally polynomial time algorithm that transforms a given Horn DNF formula into the MDNF representation.

A combination of slides used in a presentation and a video recording of the circumstances of the presentation are quite useful for many applications, such as e-learning. However, to create new content from these with current authoring tools requires considerable effort for the author and the products have reduced flexibility. In this paper, we propose the preparation of a unifying function without creating new content manually. We also propose a new approach to search unified presentation manuscripts for slides matched with given keywords by considering the features peculiar to the presentation slides. We propose impression indicators to express how well a slide matches the given keywords. We also propose a system for retrieving a sequence of desired presentation slides from archives of the combined slides and video. We named the system Unified Presentation Slide Retrieval by Impression Search Engine or UPRISE. We describe the system configuration of UPRISE and the experimentation undertaken to evaluate the effect of the proposed indicators and to compare the results with those of the traditional tf.idf retrieval method.

A web community is a set of web pages that provide resources on a specific topic. Various methods for finding web communities based on link analysis have been proposed in the literature. The method proposed in this paper is based on the method using the maximum flow algorithm proposed in. Our objective of using the maximum flow algorithm is to extract a subgraph which can be recognized as a good web community in the context of the quantity and the quality. This paper first discusses the features of the maximum flow algorithm based method. The previously proposed approach has a problem that a certain graph structure containing noises (i.e., irrelevant pages) is always extracted. This problem is mainly caused by edge capacities assigned a constant value. This paper proposes an assignment of variable edge capacities that are based on hub and authority scores obtained from HITS calculation. To examine the effects of our proposed method, we performed experiments using a Japanese archive crawled in February 2002. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method removes noise pages caused by constant edge capacities and improves the quality of web communities.

In this paper, we consider the problem of constructing a multicast tree in the star graph under the single-port communication model. Unlike previous studies for constructing space-efficient multicast trees, we adopt the completion time of each multicast as the objective function to be minimized. In particular, we study a special case of the problem in which all destination vertices are immediate neighbors of the source vertex, and propose a multicast scheme for the star graph of dimension n in 1.3125log2 n + O(log log n) time units. This running time is at most 1.3125 times of that of an optimal scheme.

Group mutual exclusion is an interesting generalization of the mutual exclusion problem. This problem was introduced by Joung, and some algorithms for the problem have been proposed by incorporating mutual exclusion algorithms. Group mutual exclusion occurs naturally in a situation where a resource can be shared by processes of the same group, but not by processes of a different group. It is also called the congenial talking philosophers problem. In this paper we propose two algorithms based on ticket orders for the group mutual exclusion problem on the asynchronous shared memory model. These algorithms are some modifications of the Bakery algorithm. They satisfy lockout freedom and a high degree of concurrency performance. Each of these algorithms uses single-writer shared variables together with two multi-writer shared variables that are never concurrently written. One of these algorithms has another desirable property, called smooth admission. By this property, during the period that the resource is occupied by the leader (called the chair), a process wishing to join the same group as the leader's group can be granted use of the resource in constant time.

Vector quantization (VQ) features a very heavy encoding process. In previous work, an efficient encoding algorithm using mean pyramid has been developed. To improve it further, a fast search algorithm is proposed in this letter. Specifically speaking, four major modifications are made. First, to rearrange the original codebook directly along the sorted real sums to reduce the search scope and then update the lower and upper bound dynamically. Second, to use sum instead of the mean that includes roundoff error to thoroughly avoid a possible mismatched winner. Third, to construct a sum pyramid using 2-pixel-merging other than 4-pixel-merging way to generate more in-between levels. Fourth, to introduce the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality to bridge Euclidean and Manhattan distance together so that the difference check between 2 vectors can be pre-conducted only by much lighter Manhattan distance computation. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is more search-efficient.

A total coloring of a graph G is to color all vertices and edges of G so that no two adjacent or incident elements receive the same color. Let C be a set of colors, and let ω be a cost function which assigns to each color c in C a real number ω(c) as a cost of c. A total coloring f of G is called an optimal total coloring if the sum of costs ω(f(x)) of colors f(x) assigned to all vertices and edges x is as small as possible. In this paper, we give an algorithm to find an optimal total coloring of any tree T in time O(nΔ3) where n is the number of vertices in T and Δ is the maximum degree of T.

Self-stabilization is a theoretical framework of non-masking fault-tolerant distributed algorithms. In this paper, we investigate the Steiner tree problem in distributed systems, and propose a self-stabilizing heuristic solution to the problem. Our algorithm is constructed by four layered modules (sub-algorithms): construction of a shortest path forest, transformation of the network, construction of a minimum spanning tree, and pruning unnecessary links and processes. Competitiveness is 2(1-1/l), where l is the number of leaves of optimal solution.

As an access network to the Internet, CATV/HFC network has been widespread recently. Such a network employs a reservation access method under which reservation and data transmission periods appear by turns. Before data transmission, a station must send a request in a random access manner during the reservation period called a request cluster. If the cluster size is large, the probability of request collision occurrence becomes small. A large cluster size however increases the packet transmission delay. Moreover the throughput decreases since vacant duration of reservation period increases. DOCSIS, a de facto standard for the networks, employs the binary back-off method for request cluster allocation. Since that method normally allocates unnecessary large request cluster, the transmission delay increases under heavy load conditions. In this paper, we propose a request cluster allocation method which dynamically changes the cluster size according to the load conditions. In order to evaluate performance of the proposed method, we build a queuing model and execute computer simulation. Simulation result shows that the proposed method provides smaller delay than the binary back-off method.