In this paper, using p-ary bent functions defined on vector space over the finite field Fpk, we generalized the construction method of the families of p-ary bent sequences with balanced and optimal correlation properties introduced by Kumar and Moreno for an odd prime p, called generalized p-ary bent sequences. It turns out that the family of balanced p-ary sequences with optimal correlation property introduced by Moriuchi and Imamura is a special case of the newly constructed generalized p-ary bent sequences.

The formation of single monolayer of liquid crystalline molecules, 4-n-pentyl-4-cyanobiphenyl (5CB), deposited by the evaporation method in the air, was confirmed with the surface potential measurement. The surface potential increased with the time of evaporation, and the 3- or 4-minute evaporation at a source temperature of 110 gave the saturated potential, indicating the formation of single monolayer. Single monolayer formation was also supported by the comparison of the UV-visible absorption for evaporated film with LB monolayer. Positive potentials were built at the surface, indicating that CN group faces the substrate.

In recent years, there has been a rapid and widespread proliferation of non-traditional embedded computing platforms such as digital camcorders, cellular phones, and portable medical devices. As applications become increasingly sophisticated and processing power increases, the application designer has to rely on the services provided by the real-time operating systems (RTOSs). These RTOSs must not only provide predictable services but must also be efficient and small in size. Kernel services should also be deterministic by specifying how long each service call will take to execute. Having this information allows the application designers to better plan their real-time application software so as not to miss the deadline of each task. In this paper, we propose a generalized deterministic scheduling algorithm that makes the task scheduling time constant irrespective of the number of tasks created in an application. The proposed algorithm eliminates the restriction on the maximum number of task priorities imposed on the existing ones, without additional memory overhead.

The matrix inequality condition has been considered as the main condition for the stability of RHC. But it is difficult to apply the matrix inequality condition for guaranteeing the stability of any physical system because of the high gain problem brought about the high value of the final state weighting matrix. Therefore, in this study, a new stability condition for RHC is proposed and it extends the range of the final state weighting matrix guaranteeing the stability of RHC in comparison with the case of the matrix inequality condition. The proposed stability condition is based not only on a final state weighting matrix but also on a horizon size and guarantees the stability for other forms of model predictive control just like the matrix inequality condition.

A "based" plane triangulation is a plane triangulation with one designated edge on the outer face. In this paper we give a simple algorithm to generate all biconnected based plane triangulations having exactly n vertices and with the maximum degree exactly D. The algorithm uses O(n) space and generates such triangulations in O(1) time per triangulation without duplications.

We present a digital algorithm for gray-scale/color image segmentation of real-time video signals and a cell-network-based implementation architecture in conventional CMOS technology. Practical application in fully-integrated QVGA-size video-picture segmentation chips is estimated to become possible at the 90 nm technology node.

A neural-signal sensing system with multi-input-channels was designed utilizing a new chopper amplifier with direct connected to a multiplexer. The proposed system consists of multiplexers, chopper amplifiers, a multi-mode analog-to-digital converter (ADC), and a wireless transmitter. It enables to measure 50-channel signals at the same time, which are selected out of 100 channels to detect useful information. The test chip including 10-channel-inputs chopper-amplifier and multi-mode ADC, that was designed and fabricated with a mixed signal 0.35-µm CMOS technology. Utilizing the proposed direct chopper input scheme and the shared chopper amplifier, the circuits was designed with a small area of 9.4 mm2. High accuracy channel selecting and multiplexing operations were confirmed, and an equivalent input noise of 10-nV/root-Hz was obtained with test chip measurements. Power dissipation of the chopper amplifier and the ADC were 6.0-mW and 2.5-mW at a 3-V supply voltage, respectively.

The poor capability of bandwidth management on the current CATV network hinders the promotion of multi-media streaming services. This paper proposes a solution by applying stream-code partition on the S-CDMA system adopted in the DOCSIS 2.0 standard. The method makes use of the Fine Granularity Scalability source coding and offers an efficient way for uplink rate control, so that bandwidth management can be performed in an extremely flexible manner.

An Ad Hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile nodes dynamically forming a temporary network without the use of any existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. The choice of medium access is difficult in Ad Hoc networks due to the time-varying network topology and the lack of centralized control. In this paper, we propose a novel multichannel schedule-based Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for Ad Hoc networks named Multichannel Reservation Protocol for TDMA-based networks (MRPT). MRPT ensures collision free in successfully reserved data links, even when hidden terminals exist. The reservation of MRPT is based a control channel and in order to improve throughput we propose Four-Phase-Two-Division (FPTD) as a media access scheme of the control channel for broadcasting control or reservation messages. In FPTD, the collision can be solved rapidly with an efficient backoff algorithm which results in that system block is avoided in case of high traffic. In this paper, we also present the throughput performance of MRPT, which shows a high value and no system block even in case of high traffic load.

In 1983, Chaum first introduced the concept of blind signature. In 2003, Hwang, Lee and Lai pointed out that the Chaum scheme cannot meet the untraceability property of the blind signature scheme. This letter will demonstrate that Hwang et al.'s claim is incorrect and the Chaum blind signature scheme still keeps the untraceability property.

We propose a novel method for Web page grouping based only on hyperlink information. Because of the explosive growth of the World Wide Web, page grouping is expected to provide a general grasp of the Web for effective information search and netsurfing. The Web can be regarded as a gigantic digraph where pages are vertices and links are arcs. Our grouping method is a generalization of decomposition into strongly connected components, in which each group is constructed as a subset of a strongly connected component. Moreover, group sizes can be controlled by adjusting a parameter, called the threshold parameter. We call the resulting groups parameterized connected components (PCCs). The algorithm is simple and admits parallelization. Notably, we apply Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm in our grouping method. This paper also includes experimental results for 15 million Web pages, which show the contribution of our method to efficient Web surfer navigation.

We describe the first highly nonlinear dispersion-flattened polarization-maintaining photonic crystal fiber designed for nonlinear optics applications in the 1.55 µm region. The nonlinear coefficient of the fiber is 19 (W-1km-1), which is ten times that of dispersion shifted fiber. The chromatic dispersion and dispersion slope of the fiber at 1.55 µm are -0.23 ps/km/nm and 0.01 ps/km/nm2, respectively. We demonstrate the generation of a supercontinuum using the photonic crystal fiber. A symmetrical supercontinuum over 40 nm is obtained by injecting 1562 nm, 2.2 ps, and 40 GHz optical pulses into the 200 m-long photonic crystal fiber.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.