We are developing an Ultra-Low Field (ULF) Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) system with a tuned high-Tc (HTS)-rf-SQUID for food inspection. We previously reported that a small hole in a piece of cucumber can be detected. The acquired image was based on filtered back-projection reconstruction using a polarizing permanent magnet. However the resolution of the image was insufficient for food inspection and took a long time to process. The purpose of this study is to improve image quality and shorten processing time. We constructed a specially designed cryostat, which consists of a liquid nitrogen tank for cooling an electromagnetic polarizing coil (135mT) at 77K and a room temperature bore. A Cu pickup coil was installed at the room temperature bore and detected an NMR signal from a sample. The signal was then transferred to an HTS SQUID via an input coil. Following a proper MRI sequence, spatial frequency data at 64×32 points in k-space were obtained. Then, a 2D-FFT (Fast Fourier Transformation) method was applied to reconstruct the 2D-MR images. As a result, we successfully obtained a clear water image of the characters “TUT”, which contains a narrowest width of 0.5mm. The imaging time was also shortened by a factor of 10 when compared to the previous system.

A triangular decomposition-based multipath super-resolution method is proposed to improve the range resolution of small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) radar altimeters that use a single channel with continuous direct spread waveform. In the engineering applications of small UAV radar altimeter, multipath scenarios are quite common. When the conventional matched filtering process is used under these environments, it is difficult to identify multiple targets in the same range cell due to the overlap between echoes. To improve the performance, we decompose the overlapped peaks yielded by matched filtering into a series of basic triangular waveforms to identify various targets with different time-shifted correlations of the pseudo-noise (PN) sequence. Shifting the time scale enables targets in the same range resolution unit to be identified. Both theoretical analysis and experiments show that the range resolution can be improved significantly, as it outperforms traditional matched filtering processes.

The rising systems programming language Rust is fast, efficient and memory safe. However, improperly dereferencing raw pointers in Rust causes new safety problems. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis into these problems and propose a practical hybrid approach to detecting unsafe raw pointer dereferencing behaviors. Our approach employs pattern matching to identify functions that can be used to generate illegal multiple mutable references (We define them as thief function) and instruments the dereferencing operation in order to perform dynamic checking at runtime. We implement a tool named UnsafeFencer and has successfully identified 52 thief functions in 28 real-world crates*, of which 13 public functions are verified to generate multiple mutable references.

Many software development teams usually tend to focus on maintenance activities in general. Recently, many studies on bug severity prediction have been proposed to help a bug reporter determine severity. But they do not consider the reporter's expression of emotion appearing in the bug report when they predict the bug severity level. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to severity prediction for reported bugs by using emotion similarity. First, we do not only compute an emotion-word probability vector by using smoothed unigram model (UM), but we also use the new bug report to find similar-emotion bug reports with Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL-divergence). Then, we introduce a new algorithm, Emotion Similarity (ES)-Multinomial, which modifies the original Naïve Bayes Multinomial algorithm. We train the model with emotion bug reports by using ES-Multinomial. Finally, we can predict the bug severity level in the new bug report. To compare the performance in bug severity prediction, we select related studies including Emotion Words-based Dictionary (EWD)-Multinomial, Naïve Bayes Multinomial, and another study as baseline approaches in open source projects (e.g., Eclipse, GNU, JBoss, Mozilla, and WireShark). The results show that our approach outperforms the baselines, and can reflect reporters' emotional expressions during the bug reporting.

In this study, the electromagnetic scatterings from conducting bodies have been investigated via a surface equivalence theorem. When one formulates equivalent electric and magnetic currents from geometrical optics (GO) reflected field in the illuminated surface and GO incident field in the shadowed surface, it has been found that the asymptotically derived radiation fields are found to be the same as those formulated from physical optics (PO) approximation.

An improved radiometric calibration algorithm by extending the Mitsunaga and Nayar least-square minimization based algorithm with two major ideas is presented. First, a noise & outlier removal procedure based on the analysis of brightness transfer function is included for improving the algorithm's capability on handling noise and outlier in least-square estimation. Second, an alternative minimization formulation based on weighted least square is proposed to improve the weakness of least square minimization when dealing with biased distribution observations. The performance of the proposed algorithm with regards to two baseline algorithms is demonstrated, i.e. the classical least square based algorithm proposed by Mitsunaga and Nayar and the state-of-the-art rank minimization based algorithm proposed by Lee et al. From the results, the proposed algorithm outperforms both baseline algorithms on both the synthetic dataset and the dataset of real-world images.

We address a BEMS (Building Energy Management System) to guarantee reliability of electric-power supply in dynamic uncertain environments. The building microgrid as the target of BEMS has multiple distributed power sources including a photo-voltaic power system and Electric-Vehicle (EV). EV is regarded as an autonomously-moving battery due to the original means of transportation and is hence a cause of dynamic uncertainty of the building microgrid. The main objective of synthesis of BEMS in this paper is to guarantee the continuous supply of power to the most critical load in a building microgrid and to realize the power supply to the other loads according to a ranking of load importance. We synthesize the BEMS as a reactive control system that monitors changes of dynamic uncertain environment of the microgrid including departure and arrival of an EV, and determines a route of power supply to the most critical load. Also, we conduct numerical experiments of the reactive BEMS using models of power flows in the building and of charging states of the batteries. The experiments are incorporated with data measured in a practical office building and demonstration project of EMS at Osaka, Japan. We show that the BEMS works for extending the time duration of continuous power supply to the most critical load.

We propose a weighted subtask controller and sufficient conditions for boundedness of the controller both velocity and acceleration domain. Prior to designing the subtask controller, a task controller is designed for global asymptotic stability of task space error and subtask error. Although the subtask error converges to zero by the task controller, the boundedness of the subtask controller is also important, therefore its boundedness conditions are presented. The weighted pseudo inverse is introduced to relax the constraints of the null-space of Jacobian. Using the pseudo inverse, we design subtask controller and propose sufficient conditions for boundedness of the auxiliary signal to show the existence of the inverse kinematic solution. The results of experiments using 7-DOF WAM show the effectiveness of the proposed controller.

A new method for adaptive digital beamforming technique with compressed sensing (CS) for sparse receiving arrays with gain/phase uncertainties is presented. Because of the sparsity of the arriving signals, CS theory can be adopted to sample and recover receiving signals with less data. But due to the existence of the gain/phase uncertainties, the sparse representation of the signal is not optimal. In order to eliminating the influence of the gain/phase uncertainties to the sparse representation, most present study focus on calibrating the gain/phase uncertainties first. To overcome the effect of the gain/phase uncertainties, a new dictionary optimization method based on the total least squares (TLS) algorithm is proposed in this paper. We transfer the array signal receiving model with the gain/phase uncertainties into an EIV model, treating the gain/phase uncertainties effect as an additive error matrix. The method we proposed in this paper reconstructs the data by estimating the sparse coefficients using CS signal reconstruction algorithm and using TLS method toupdate error matrix with gain/phase uncertainties. Simulation results show that the sparse regularized total least squares algorithm can recover the receiving signals better with the effect of gain/phase uncertainties. Then adaptive digital beamforming algorithms are adopted to form antenna beam using the recovered data.

We propose a new signature-based, on-demand anti-virus solution using in-storage processing (ISP) to inspect the inside of a storage device. In-storage anti-virus systems are able to isolate malicious effects from main computing platforms, and they reduce the system overhead for virus detection. We implement our in-storage anti-virus platform using cost-effective, open-source hardware, and we verify that is practically applicable to storage devices.

This paper proposes a novel access control scheme with collision detection that utilizes multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology. Carrier sense multiple access with collision detection (CSMA/CD) is used in Ethernet wired local area networks (LANs) for media access control (MAC). CSMA/CD can immediately abort a transmission if any collision is detected and is thus able to change to a retransmission state. In Ethernet, CSMA/CD results in a transmission efficiency of approximately 90% because the protocol makes the transmission band available for useful communication by this retransmission function. Conversely, in conventional wireless LANs (WLANs), the packet collisions due to interfering signals and the retransmission due to collisions are significant issues. Because conventional WLANs cannot detect packet collisions during signal transmission, the success of a transmission can only be determined by whether an acknowledgment (ACK) frame has been received. Consequently, the transmission efficiency is low — approximately 60%. The objective of our study is to increase the transmission efficiency of WLANs to make it at least equal to that of Ethernet. Thus, we propose a novel access control scheme with collision detection that utilizes MIMO technology. When preamble signals are transmitted before transmitting data packets from an antenna, the proposed scheme can detect packet collisions during signal transmission at another antenna; then, the affected packets are retransmitted immediately. Two fundamental technologies are utilized to realize our proposed scheme. The first technology is the access control protocol in the MAC layer in the form of the MIMO frame sequence protocol, which is used to detect signal interference. The other technology is signal processing in the physical (PHY) layer that actualizes collision detection. This paper primarily deals with the proposed MAC layer scheme, which is evaluated by theoretical analyses and computer simulations. Evaluation by computer simulations indicate that the proposed scheme in a transmission efficiency of over 90%.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission, in which the number of antennas is considerably more than the number of user terminals, has attracted attention as a key technology in next-generation mobile communication systems, because it enables improvements in the service area and interference mitigation with simple signal processing. Multi-beam massive MIMO employing high-power beam selection in the analog part and a blind algorithm in the digital part, such as the constant modulus algorithm that does not need channel state information, has been proposed and shown to offer high transmission efficiency. In this paper, in order to realize higher transmission rates and communication efficiency, we propose a beam-selection method that uses multi-beam amplitude information only. Furthermore, this method can be realized through signal processing with a simple configuration and is highly suitable for hybrid analog-digital massive MIMO, which is advantageous in terms of cost and power consumption. Here, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by computer simulation.

Existing trajectory prediction methods suffer from the “data sparsity” and neglect “time awareness”, which leads to low accuracy. Aiming to the problem, we propose a fast time-aware sparse trajectories prediction with tensor factorization method (TSTP-TF). Firstly, we do trajectory synthesis based on trajectory entropy and put synthesized trajectories into the original trajectory space. It resolves the sparse problem of trajectory data and makes the new trajectory space more reliable. Then, we introduce multidimensional tensor modeling into Markov model to add the time dimension. Tensor factorization is adopted to infer the missing regions transition probabilities to further solve the problem of data sparsity. Due to the scale of the tensor, we design a divide and conquer tensor factorization model to reduce memory consumption and speed up decomposition. Experiments with real dataset show that TSTP-TF improves prediction accuracy generally by as much as 9% and 2% compared to the Baseline algorithm and ESTP-MF algorithm, respectively.

In this paper, we posit that, in future mobile network, network softwarization will be prevalent, and it becomes important to utilize deep machine learning within network to classify mobile traffic into fine grained slices, by identifying application types and devices so that we can apply Quality-of-Service (QoS) control, mobile edge/multi-access computing, and various network function per application and per device. This paper reports our initial attempt to apply deep machine learning for identifying application types from actual mobile network traffic captured from an MVNO, mobile virtual network operator and to design the system for classifying it to application specific slices.

The abnormal crowd behavior detection is an important research topic in computer vision to improve the response time of critical events. In this letter, we introduce a novel method to detect and localize the crowd gathering in surveillance videos. The proposed foreground stillness model is based on the foreground object mask and the dense optical flow to measure the instantaneous crowd stillness level. Further, we obtain the long-term crowd stillness level by the leaky bucket model, and the crowd gathering behavior can be detected by the threshold analysis. Experimental results indicate that our proposed approach can detect and locate crowd gathering events, and it is capable of distinguishing between standing and walking crowd. The experiments in realistic scenes with 88.65% accuracy for detection of gathering frames show that our method is effective for crowd gathering behavior detection.

We discuss our recent progress in photonic crystal nanocavity quantum dot lasers. We show how enhanced light matter interactions in the nanocavity lead to diverse and fascinating lasing phenomena that are in general inaccessible by conventional bulky semiconductor lasers. First, we demonstrate thresholdless lasing, in which any clear kink in the output laser curve does not appear. This is a result of near unity coupling of spontaneous emission into the lasing cavity mode, enabled by the strong Purcell effect supported in the nanocavity. Then, we discuss self-frequency conversion nanolasers, in which both near infrared lasing oscillation and nonlinear optical frequency conversion to visible light are simultaneously supported in the individual nanocavity. Owing to the tight optical confinement both in time and space, a high normalized conversion efficiency over a few hundred %/W is demonstrated. We also show that the intracavity nonlinear frequency conversion can be utilized to measure the statistics of the intracavity photons. These novel phenomena will be useful for developing various nano-optoelectronic devices with advanced functionalities.

Multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) improves the system channel capacity by generating a large virtual MIMO channel between a base station and multiple user terminals (UTs) with effective utilization of wireless resources. Block beamforming algorithms such as Block Diagonalization (BD) and Block Maximum Signal-to-Noise ratio (BMSN) have been proposed in order to realize MU-MIMO broadcast transmission. The BD algorithm cancels inter-user interference (IUI) by creating the weights so that the channel matrices for the other users are set to be zero matrices. The BMSN algorithm has a function of maintaining a high gain response for each desired user in addition to IUI cancellation. Therefore, the BMSN algorithm generally outperforms the BD algorithm. However, when the number of transmit antennas is equal to the total number of receive antennas, the transmission rate by both BD and BMSN algorithms is decreased. This is because the eigenvalues of channel matrices are too small to support data transmission. To resolve the issue, this paper focuses on an antenna selection (AS) method at the UTs. The AS method reduces the number of pattern nulls for the other users except an intended user in the BD and BMSN algorithms. It is verified via bit error rate (BER) evaluation that the AS method is effective in the BD and BMSN algorithms, especially, when the number of user antennas with a low bit rate (i.e., low signal-to-noise power ratio) is increased. Moreover, this paper evaluates the achievable bit rate and throughput including an actual channel state information feedback based on IEEE802.11ac standard. Although the number of equivalent receive antenna is reduced to only one by the AS method when the number of antennas at the UT is two, it is shown that the throughputs by BD and BMSN with the AS method (BD-AS and BMSN-AS) are higher than those by the conventional BD and BMSN algorithms.

Non-volatile memories are a promising alternative to memory design but data stored in them still may be destructed due to crosstalk and radiation. The data stored in them can be restored by using error-correcting codes but they require extra bits to correct bit errors. One of the largest problems in non-volatile memories is that they consume ten to hundred times more energy than normal memories in bit-writing. It is quite necessary to reduce writing bits. Recently, a REC code (bit-write-reducing and error-correcting code) is proposed for non-volatile memories which can reduce writing bits and has a capability of error correction. The REC code is generated from a linear systematic error-correcting code but it must include the codeword of all 1's, i.e., 11…1. The codeword bit length must be longer in order to satisfy this condition. In this letter, we propose a method to generate a relaxed REC code which is generated from a relaxed error-correcting code, which does not necessarily include the codeword of all 1's and thus its codeword bit length can be shorter. We prove that the maximum flipping bits of the relaxed REC code is still limited theoretically. Experimental results show that the relaxed REC code efficiently reduce the number of writing bits.

Computing autocorrelation coefficient can effectively reduce the influence of additive white noise, thus estimation precision will be improved. In this paper, an autocorrelation-like function, different from the ordinary one, is defined, and is proven to own better linear predictive performance. Two algorithms for signal model are developed to achieve frequency estimates. We analyze the theoretical properties of the algorithms in the additive white Gaussian noise. The simulation results match with the theoretical values well in the sense of mean square error. The proposed algorithms compare with existing estimators, are closer to the Cramer-Rao bound (CRLB). In addition, computer simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithms provide high accuracy and good anti-noise capability.

Throughput prediction is one of the promising techniques to improve the quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) of mobile applications. To address the problem of predicting future throughput distribution accurately during the whole session, which can exhibit large throughput fluctuations in different scenarios (especially scenarios of moving user), we propose a history-based throughput prediction method that utilizes time series analysis and machine learning techniques for mobile network communication. This method is called the Hybrid Prediction with the Autoregressive Model and Hidden Markov Model (HOAH). Different from existing methods, HOAH uses Support Vector Machine (SVM) to classify the throughput transition into two classes, and predicts the transmission control protocol (TCP) throughput by switching between the Autoregressive Model (AR Model) and the Gaussian Mixture Model-Hidden Markov Model (GMM-HMM). We conduct field experiments to evaluate the proposed method in seven different scenarios. The results show that HOAH can predict future throughput effectively and decreases the prediction error by a maximum of 55.95% compared with other methods.