The imprecise computation model is one of the flexible computation models used to construct real-time systems. It is especially useful when the worst case execution times are difficult to estimate or the execution times vary widely. Although there are several ways to implement this model, they have not attained much attentions of real-world application programmers to date due to their unrealistic assumptions and high dependency on the execution environment. In this paper, we present an integrated approach for implementing the imprecise computation model. In particular, our research covers three aspects. First, we present a new imprecise computation model which consists of a mandatory part, an optional part, and another mandatory part called wind-up part. This wind-up part allows application programmers to explicitly incorporate into their programs the exact operations needed for safe degradation of performance when there is a shortage in resources. Second, we describe a scheduling algorithm called Mandatory-First with Wind-up Part (M-FWP) which is based on the Earliest Deadline First strategy. This algorithm, unlike scheduling algorithms developed for the classical imprecise computation model, is capable of scheduling a mandatory portion after an optional portion. Third, we present a dynamic priority server method for an efficient implementation of the M-FWP algorithm. We also show that the number of the proposed server at most needed per node is one. In order to estimate the performance of the proposed approach, we have implemented a real-time operating system called RT-Frontier. The experimental analyses have proven its ability to implement tasks based on the imprecise computation model without requiring any knowledge on the execution time of the optional part. Moreover, it also showed performance gain over the traditional checkpointing technique.

The recent real time systems have the needs of system expandability with heterogeneous functions and operations. High assurance system is very important for such systems. In order to realize the high assurance system, we research the autonomous step-by-step construction technique based on assurance evaluation. In this paper we propose the average functional reliability as the best index to indicate the assurance performance for system construction. We also propose the autonomous step-by-step construction technique to decide the construction sequence to maximize the assurance performance.

Information service provision and utilization is an important infrastructure in the high-assurance distributed information service system. In order to cope with the rapidly evolving situations of providers' and users' heterogeneous requirements, one autonomous information service system has been proposed, called Faded Information Field (FIF). FIF is a distributed information service system architecture, sustained by push/pull mobile agents, through a recursive demand-oriented provision of the most popular information closer to the users to make a tradeoff between the cost of service allocation and access. In this system, users' requests are autonomously driven by pull mobile agents in charge of finding the relevant service. In the case of a mono-service request, the system is designed to reduce the time needed for users to access the information and to preserve the consistency of the replicas. However, when the user requests joint selection of multiple services, synchronization of atomic actions and timeliness have to be assured by the system. In this paper, the relationship that exists among the contents, properties and access ratios of information services is clarified. Based on these factors, the ratio of correlation and degree of satisfaction are defined and the autonomous integration and optimal allocation of information services for heterogeneous FIFs to provide one-stop service for users' multi-service requirements are proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed technology is shown through evaluation and the results show that the integrated services can reduce the total users access time and increase services consumption compared with separate systems.

High-temperature stability of copper (Cu) gate AlGaN/GaN high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) was investigated. Samples were annealed at various temperatures to monitor the changes on device performances. Current-voltage performance such as drain-source current, transconductance, threshold voltage and gate leakage current has no obvious degradation up to annealing temperature of 500 and time of 5 minutes. Also up to this temperature, no copper diffusion was found at the Cu and AlGaN interface by secondary ion mass spectrometry determination. At annealing temperature of 700 and time of 5 minutes, device performance was found to have degraded. Gate voltage swing increased and threshold voltage shifted due to Cu diffusion into AlGaN. These results indicate that the Schottky contact and device performance of Cu-gate AlGaN/GaN HEMT is stable up to annealing temperature of 500. Cu is a promising candidate as gate metallization for high-performance power AlGaN/GaN HEMTs.

This paper presents a novel data placement and retrieval scheme for video-on-demand systems. In particular, a zone-based data placement scheme is employed to reduce the average seek time of the disk array storage system and thus increase the disk access bandwidth to allow the video server provide more services of video programs concurrently. Furthermore, due to the inherent nature of video access, a popular program always requires more accesses and therefore occupies more disk I/O bandwidth as request for serving such program increases. A new retrieval strategy is proposed to maintain a single copy of each video program disregarding the popularity of the video programs, and to achieve maximum I/O throughput of the video server.

In this paper, we focus on the problem of secure multicast in dynamic groups. In this problem, a group of users communicate using a shared group key. Due to the dynamic nature of these groups, to preserve secrecy, it is necessary to change the group key whenever the group membership changes. While the group key is being changed, the group communication needs to be interrupted until the rekeying is complete. This interruption is especially necessary if the rekeying is done because a user has left (or is removed). We split the rekeying cost into two parts: the cost of the critical path--where each user receives the new group key, and the cost of the non-critical path--where each user receives any other keys that it needs to obtain. We present a family of algorithms that show the tradeoff between the cost of the critical path and the cost of the non-critical path. Our solutions allow the group controller to choose the appropriate algorithm for key distribution by considering the requirements on critical and non-critical cost. In our solutions, the group controller can dynamically change the algorithm for key distribution to adapt to changing application requirements. Moreover, we argue that our solutions allow the group controller to effectively manage heterogeneous groups where users have different requirements/capabilities.

The Earth Simulator (ES), developed by the Japanese government's initiative "Earth Simulator project," is a highly parallel vector supercomputer system. In May 2002, the ES was proven to be the most powerful computer in the world by achieving 35.86 teraflops on the LINPACK benchmark and 26.58 teraflops for a global atmospheric circulation model with the spectral method. Three architectural features enabled these great achievements; vector processor, shared-memory and high-bandwidth non-blocking interconnection crossbar network. In this paper, an overview of the ES, the three architectural features and the result of performance evaluation are described particularly with its hardware realization of the interconnection among 640 processor nodes.

As a lot of programs and contents such as movie files are being delivered via the Internet, and copies are often stored in distributed servers in order to reduce the load on the original servers, to ease network congestion, and to decrease response time. To retrieve an object file, existing methods simply select one or more servers. Such methods divide a file into equal pieces whose size is determined a priori. This approach is not practical for networks that offer variable bandwidth. In order to more utilize variable bandwidth, we propose an adaptive downloading method. We evaluate it by experiments conducted on the Internet. The results show that the new method is effective and that it will become an important network control technology for assurance.

In an optical time domain reflectometer type strain measurement system, we theoretically derive the shape of the Brillouin gain spectrum produced in an optical fiber under a parabolic strain distribution which is formed in a uniformly loaded beam. Based on the derived result, we investigate the effects of the parabolic strain distribution parameters and the measurement conditions such as the launched pulse width and the measurement position on the beam on the deformation of the Brillouin backscattered-light power spectrum shape. In addition, we investigate the strain measurement error resulting from the deformation of the power spectrum shape by analyzing the peak-power frequency at which the power spectrum is maximized.

We propose a normalization scheme of syntactic structures using a binary phrase structure grammar with composite labels. The normalization adopts binary rules so that the dependency between two sub-trees can be represented in the label of the tree. The label of a tree is composed of two attributes, each of which is extracted from each sub-tree, so that it can represent the compositional information of the tree. The composite label is generated from part-of-speech tags using an automatic labelling algorithm. Since the proposed normalization scheme is binary and uses only part-of-speech information, it can readily be used to compare the results of different syntactic analyses independently of their syntactic description and can be applied to other languages as well. It can also be used for syntactic analysis, which performs higher than the previous syntactic description for Korean corpus. We implement a tool that transforms a syntactic description into normalized one based on this proposed scheme. It can help construct a unified syntactic corpus and extract syntactic information from various types of syntactic corpus in a uniform way.

We propose a frequency stabilization system for laser diodes (LDs), in which the electrical feedback loop response can be determined using an on-line genetic algorithm (GA) so as to attain lower LD frequency noise power within the specific Fourier frequency range of interest. At the initial stage of the stabilization, the feedback loop response has been controlled through GA, manipulating the proportional gain, integration time, and derivative time of conventional analog PID controller. Individuals having 12-bit chromosomes encoded by combinations of PID parameters have converged evolutionarily toward an optimal solution providing a suitable feedback loop response. A fitness function has been calculated for each individual in real time based on the power spectral density (PSD) of the frequency noise. The performance of this system has been tested by stabilizing a 50 mW visible LD. Long-term (τ > 0.01 s) frequency stability and its repeatability have been improved.

In this paper we present an unsupervised color image segmentation algorithm based on statistical models. We have adopted the Gaussian mixture model to represent the distribution of color feature vectors. A novel deterministic annealing EM and mean field theory from statistical mechanics are used to compute the posterior probability distribution of each pixel and estimate the parameters of the Gaussian Mixture Model. We describe the noncontexture segmentation algorithm that uses a deterministic annealing approach and the contexture segmentation algorithm that uses the mean field theory. The experimental results show that the deterministic annealing EM and mean field theory provide a global optimal solution for the maximum likelihood estimators and that these algorithms can efficiently segment the real image.

Schottky gas sensors of CO were fabricated using high quality AlGaN/GaN/Si heterostructures. The CO sensors show good sensitivity in the temperature range of 250 to 300 (530%, at 160 ppm CO in N2) and fast response comparable with SnO2 sensors. A two-region linear regime was observed for the dependence of sensitivity on CO concentration. GaN sensors on Si substrate offer the possibility of integration with Si based electronics. The gas sensors show slow response with time, the change of material properties possibly in the presence of large thermal stress.

This paper proposes the conditional LZ complexity and analyzes its property. Especially, we show an inequality corresponding to Ziv's inequality concerning a distinct parsing of a pair of sequences. Further, as a byproduct of the result, we show a simple proof of the asymptotical optimality of Ziv's universal source coding algorithm with side information.

In this letter, we propose (1) a new sub-optimum minimum distance search (sub-MDS), whose search complexity is reduced considerably compared with optimum MDSs and (2) a termination criterion, called near optimality condition, to reduce the average number of decoding iterations with little degradation of error performance for the proposed decoding using sub-MDS iteratively. Consequently, the decoding algorithm can be applied to longer codes with feasible complexity. Simulation results for several Reed-Muller (RM) codes of lengths 256 and 512 are given.

For radar tracking, the α-β filter and the Kalman filter, both of which do not require large computational requirements, have been widely utilized. However these filters cannot track a maneuvering target accurately. In recent years, the IMM (Interactive Multiple Model) algorithm has been proposed. The IMM is expected to reduce tracking errors for both non-maneuvering and maneuvering target. However, the IMM requires heavy computational burden, because it utilizes multiple Kalman filters in parallel. On the other hand, the α-β filter with an acceleration term which can estimate maneuver acceleration from the past target estimated positions using the kinetic model, has been proposed. This filter is not available for tracking targets under clutter environment, since it does not calculate the covariance matrix which is needed for gate setting. In this paper, we apply the acceleration estimate to the Kalman filter, and propose the hybrid Kalman filter with a constant-velocity filter and an acceleration estimation filter, and it integrates the outputs of two filters using the normalized distance of the prediction error of each filter. The computational requirement of the proposed filter is smaller than that of the IMM since the proposed filter consists of only two Kalman based filters. The proposed method can prevent deteriorating tracking accuracy by reducing the risk of maneuver misdetection when a target maneuvers. We evaluate the performance of the proposed filter by computer simulation, and show the effectiveness of the proposed filter, comparing with the conventional Kalman filter and the two-stage Kalman filter.

The general public is expected to demand in not too distant future instituting more stringent certification procedures for computing parts of traditional and new-generation safety-critical application systems. Such quality-of-service (QoS) certification processes will not and can not rely solely on the testing approach. Design-time guaranteeing of timely service capabilities of various subsystems is an inevitable part of such processes. Although some promising developments in this area have been occurring in recent years, the technological challenges yet to be overcome are enormous. This paper is a summary of the author's perspective on the remaining challenges and promising directions for tackling them.

In this paper, an iterative decoding algorithm for channels with additive linear dynamical noise is presented. The proposed algorithm is based on the tightly coupled two inference algorithms: the sum-product algorithm which infers the information symbols of an low density parity check (LDPC) code and the Kalman smoothing algorithm which infers the channel states. The linear dynamical noise are the noise generated from a linear dynamical system. We often encounter such noise (i.e., additive colored noise) in practical communication and storage systems. The conventional iterative decoding algorithms such as the sum-product algorithm cannot derive full potential of turbo codes nor LDPC codes over such a channel because the conventional algorithms are designed under the independence assumption on the noise. Several simulations have been performed to assess the performance of the proposed algorithm. From the simulation results, it can be concluded that the Kalman smoothing algorithm deserves to be implemented in a decoder when the linear dynamical part of the linear dynamical noise is dominant rather than the white Gaussian noise part. In such a case, the performance of the proposed algorithm is far superior to that of the conventional algorithm.

A rectangular-to-radial waveguide transformer through a crossed slot is proposed as a feeder of a radial line slot antenna (RLSA) for use in a system of solar power satellite (SPS). The transformer is analyzed and designed by using the MoM with numerical eigenmode basis functions. The measured ripple of the amplitude is 3.0 dB in the φ-direction and a 7.0% frequency bandwidth for rotating mode with the ripple below 6 dB is obtained. This bandwidth is wider than that of conventional ring slot or cavity resonator with a coaxial feeder. The antenna measurements at 5.8 GHz show reasonable rotational symmetry both in the near-field distribution and the far field radiation patterns. The reflection is -27.7 dB at the design frequency and below -15 dB in the 7.0% bandwidth. The gain of the antenna with the diameter of 300 mm is 22.7 dBi and the efficiency is 56%.

In this letter, a new output feedback tracking control using a fuzzy disturbance observer (FDO) is proposed and its application to control of a nonlinear system in the presence of the internal parameter perturbation and external disturbance is presented. An FDO using a filtered signal is developed and the high gain observer (HGO) is employed to implement the output feedback tracking control. It is shown in a rigorous manner that all the errors involved can be kept arbitrarily small. Finally, the effectiveness and the feasibility of the suggested method is demonstrated by computer simulation.