Increased inductance values and contact resistance in connector contact surfaces due to degradation of connector contact performance have been reported. In particular, inductance increases while degradation remains minimal. We focus on slight loosening in which increased inductance values are observed without increased resistance values, and investigate the effect of loose connectors on transmission line coupling noise under such circumstances. We find a proportional relation between coupled noise current and frequency. Moreover, we find a proportional relation between the increased inductance value, which depends on the change in connector contact distribution, and the coupled noise current in the transmission line.

We analyze the outage probability of the multiuser two-way relay network (TWRN) where the N-th best mobile user (MU) out of M MUs and the base station (BS) exchange messages with the aid of an amplify-and-forward relay. In the analysis, we focus on the practical unbalanced Nakagami-m fading between the MUs-relay link and the relay-BS link. We also consider both perfect and outdated channel state information (CSI) between the MUs and the relay. We first derive tight closed-form lower bounds on the outage probability. We then derive compact expressions for the asymptotic outage probability to explicitly characterize the network performance in the high signal-to-noise ratio regime. Based on our asymptotic results, we demonstrate that the diversity order is determined by both Nakagami-m fading parameters, M, and N when perfect CSI is available. When outdated CSI is available, the diversity order is determined by Nakagami-m fading parameters only. In addition, we quantify the contributions of M, N, and the outdated CSI to the outage probability via the array gain.

The data rate of VLSI interconnections has been increasing according to the demand for high-speed operation of semiconductors such as CPUs. To realize high performance VLSI systems, high-speed data communication has become an important factor. However, at high-speed data rates, it is difficult to achieve accurate communication without bit errors because of inter-symbol interference (ISI). This paper presents high-speed data communication techniques for VLSI systems using Tomlinson-Harashima Precoding (THP). Since THP can eliminate the ISI with limiting average and peak power of transmitter signaling, THP is suitable for implementing advanced low-voltage VLSI systems. In this paper, 4-PAM (Pulse amplitude modulation) with THP has been employed to achieve high-speed data communication in VLSI systems. Simulation results show that THP can remove the ISI without increasing peak and average power of a transmitter. Moreover, simulation results clarify that multiple-valued data communication is very effective to reduce implementation costs for realizing high-speed serial links.

In this paper, we analyze the performance of a dual-hop multiuser amplify-and-forward (AF) relay network with the effect of the feedback delay, where the source and each of the K destinations are equipped with Nt and Nr antennas respectively, and the relay is equipped with a single antenna. In the relay network, multi-antenna and multiuser diversities are guaranteed via beamforming and opportunistic scheduling, respectively. To examine the impact of delayed feedback, the new exact analytical expressions for the outage probability (OP) and symbol error rate (SER) are derived in closed-form over Rayleigh fading channel, which are useful for a large number of modulation schemes. In addition, we present the asymptotic expressions for OP and SER in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, from which we gain an insight into the system performance with deriving the diversity order and array gain. Moreover, based on the asymptotic expressions, we determine power allocation among the network nodes such that the OP is minimized. The analytical expressions are validated by Monte-Carlo simulations.

Fault localization is a necessary process of locating faults in buggy programs. This paper proposes a novel approach using dynamic slicing and association analysis to improve the effectiveness of fault localization. Our approach utilizes dynamic slicing to generate a reduced candidate set to narrow the range of faults, and introduces association analysis to mine the relationship between the statements in the execution traces and the test results. In addition, we develop a prototype tool DSFL to implement our approach. Furthermore, we perform a set of empirical studies with 12 Java programs to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The experimental results show that our approach is more effective than the compared approaches.

For the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, a fast transform unit (TU) decision method is proposed. HEVC defines the TU representing a region sharing the same transformation, and it supports various transform sizes from 4×4 to 32×32 by using a quadtree of TUs. The various sizes of TUs can provide good coding efficiency, whereas it may dramatically increase encoding complexity. Assuming that a TU with highly compacted energy is unlikely to be split, the proposed method determines an appropriate TU size according to the position of the last non-zero transform coefficient. Experimental results show that this reduces encoding run time by 17.2% with a negligible coding loss of 0.78% BD-rate for the random-access scenario.

This study analyzes emotions established between people while interacting in face-to-face conversation. By focusing on empathy and antipathy, especially the process by which they are perceived by external observers, this paper aims to elucidate the tendency of their perception and from it develop a computational model that realizes the automatic inference of perceived empathy/antipathy. This paper makes two main contributions. First, an experiment demonstrates that an observer's perception of an interacting pair is affected by the time lags found in their actions and reactions in facial expressions and by whether their expressions are congruent or not. For example, a congruent but delayed reaction is unlikely to be perceived as empathy. Based on our findings, we propose a probabilistic model that relates the perceived empathy/antipathy of external observers to the actions and reactions of conversation participants. An experiment is conducted on ten conversations performed by 16 women in which the perceptions of nine external observers are gathered. The results demonstrate that timing cues are useful in improving the inference performance, especially for perceived antipathy.

Most existing outlier detection algorithms only utilized location of trajectory points and neglected some important factors such as speed, acceleration, and corner. To address this problem, we present a Trajectory Outlier Detection algorithm based on Multi-Factors (TODMF). TODMF is improved in terms of distance-based outlier detection algorithms. It combines multi-factors into outlier detection to find more meaningful trajectory outliers. We resort to Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) to optimize the number of factors when determining what factors will be considered. Finally, the experiments with real trajectory data sets show that TODMF performs efficiently and effectively when applied to the problem of trajectory outlier detection.

This paper proposes a novel multimodal interactive surgical simulator that incorporates haptic, olfactory, as well as traditional vision feedback. A scent diffuser was developed to produce odors when errors occur. Haptic device was used to provide the sense of touch to the user. The preliminary results show that adding smell as an aid to the simulation enhanced the memory retention that lead to better performance.

Recently, we proposed a weak-form discretization scheme to derive second-order difference equations from the governing equation of the scattering problem. In this paper, under the scope of the proposed scheme, numerical expressions for the waveguide boundary conditions are derived as perfectly absorbing conditions for input and output ports. The waveguide boundary conditions play an important role in extracting the quasi-localized wave as an eigenstate with a complex eigenvalue. The wave-number dependence of the resonance curve in Fano resonance is reproduced by using a semi-analytic model that is developed on the basis of the phase change relevant to the S-matrix. The reproduction confirms that the eigenstate with a complex eigenvalue does cause the observed Fano resonance.

Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) was standardized to reduce the long handoff latency, packet loss and signaling overhead of MIPv6 protocol and to exempt the mobile node from any involvement in the handoff process. However, the basic PMIPv6 does not provide any buffering scheme for packets during MNs handoff. In addition, all the binding update messages are processed by a Local Mobility Anchor (LMA) which leads to increase the handoff latency. Previous works enhanced PMIPv6 performance by applying fast handoff mechanisms to reduce the packet loss during handoffs; however, the LMA is still involved during the location update operations. In this paper, we present a new fast handoff scheme based on a cluster-based architecture for the PMIPv6 named Fast handoff Clustered PMIPv6 (CFPMIPv6); it reduces both the handoff signaling and packet loss ratio. In the proposed scheme, the Mobility Access Gateways (MAGs) are grouped into clusters with a one distinguished Head MAG (HMAG) for each cluster. The main role of the HMAG is to carry out the intra-cluster handoff operations and provide fast and seamless handoff services. The proposed CFPMIPv6 is evaluated analytically and compared with the previous work including the basic PMIPv6, Fast PMIPv6 based on Multicast MAGs group (MFPMIPv6), and the Fast Handoff using Head MAG schemes (HFPMIPv6). The obtained numerical results show that the proposed CFPMIPv6 outperforms all the basic PMIPv6, MFPMIP6, and HFPMIPv6 schemes in terms of the handoff signaling cost.

The main purpose of this paper is to apply the boundary integral equation (BIE) method to the analysis of spoof localized surface plasmons (spoof LSPs) excited in a perfectly conducting cylinder with longitudinal corrugations. Frequency domain BIE schemes based on electric field integral equation (EFIE), magnetic field integral equation (MFIE) and combined field integral equation (CFIE) formulations are used to solve two-dimensional electromagnetic (EM) problems of scattering from the cylinder illuminated by a transverse electric plane wave. In this approach effects of spoof LSPs are included in the secondary surface current and charge densities resulting from the interaction between the plane wave and the cylinder. Numerical results obtained with the BIE schemes are validated by comparison with that of a recently proposed modal solution based on the metamaterial approximation.

In this letter, a new sparse locality preserving projection (SLPP) algorithm is developed and applied to facial expression recognition. In comparison with the original locality preserving projection (LPP) algorithm, the presented SLPP algorithm is able to simultaneously find the intrinsic manifold of facial feature vectors and deal with facial feature selection. This is realized by the use of l1-norm regularization in the LPP objective function, which is directly formulated as a least squares regression pattern. We use two real facial expression databases (JAFFE and Ekman's POFA) to testify the proposed SLPP method and certain experiments show that the proposed SLPP approach respectively gains 77.60% and 82.29% on JAFFE and POFA database.

Fault tolerant methods using dynamically reconfigurable devices have been studied to overcome wear-out failures. However, quantitative comparisons have not been sufficiently assessed on device lifetime enhancement with these methods, whereas they have mainly been evaluated individually from various viewpoints such as additional hardware overheads, performance, and downtime for fault recovery. This paper presents quantitative lifetime evaluations performed by simulating the fault-avoidance procedures of five representative methods under the same conditions in wear-out scenarios, applications, and device architecture. The simulation results indicated that improvements of up to 70% mean-time-to-failure (MTTF) in comparison with ideal fault avoidance could be achieved by using methods of fault avoidance with ‘row direction shift’ and ‘dynamic partial reconfiguration’. ‘Column shift’, on the other hand, attained a high degree of stability with moderate improvements in MTTF. The experimental results also revealed that spare basic elements (BEs) should be prevented from aging so that improvements in MTTF would not be adversely affected. Moreover, we found that the selection of initial mappings guided by wire utilization could increase the lifetimes of partial reconfiguration based fault avoidance.

A maximum-likelihood code acquisition scheme is investigated for frequency-selective fading channels with an emphasis on the decision strategies. Using the maximum-likelihood estimation technique, we first derive an optimal decision rule, which is optimal in the viewpoint of probability of detection. Based on the derived optimal decision rule, a practical and simple decision rule is also developed, and its performance is assessed for both single dwell and double dwell acquisition systems. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed acquisition scheme significantly outperforms the previously proposed schemes in frequency-selective fading channels.

Classification tasks in computer vision and brain-computer interface research have presented several applications such as biometrics and cognitive training. However, like in any other discipline, determining suitable representation of data has been challenging, and recent approaches have deviated from the familiar form of one vector for each data sample. This paper considers a kernel between vector sets, the mean polynomial kernel, motivated by recent studies where data are approximated by linear subspaces, in particular, methods that were formulated on Grassmann manifolds. This kernel takes a more general approach given that it can also support input data that can be modeled as a vector sequence, and not necessarily requiring it to be a linear subspace. We discuss how the kernel can be associated with the Projection kernel, a Grassmann kernel. Experimental results using face image sequences and physiological signal data show that the mean polynomial kernel surpasses existing subspace-based methods on Grassmann manifolds in terms of predictive performance and efficiency.

In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient face representation feature that adopts the eigenfaces of Local Binary Pattern (LBP) space, referred to as the LBP eigenfaces, for robust face recognition. In the proposed method, LBP eigenfaces are generated by first mapping the original image space to the LBP space and then projecting the LBP space to the LBP eigenface subspace by Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Therefore, LBP eigenfaces capture both the local and global structures of face images. In the experiments, the proposed LBP eigenfaces are integrated into two types of classification methods, Nearest Neighbor (NN) and Collaborative Representation-based Classification (CRC). Experimental results indicate that the classification with the LBP eigenfaces outperforms that with the original eigenfaces and LBP histogram.

Integrated InP polarization converters based on half-ridge structure are studied numerically. We demonstrate that the fabrication tolerance of the half-ridge structure can be extended significantly by introducing a slope at the ridge side and optimizing the thickness of the residual InGaAsP layer. High polarization conversion over 90% is achieved with the broad range of the waveguide width from 705 to 915~nm, corresponding to a factor-of-two or larger improvement in the fabrication tolerance compared with that of the conventional polarization converters. Finally we present a simple fabrication procedure of this newly proposed structure, where the thickness of the residual InGaAsP layer is controlled precisely by using a thin etch-stop layer.

We propose multi-core erbium-doped fiber amplifiers for next-generation optical amplifiers utilized by space-division multiplexing technologies. Multi-core erbium-doped fiber amplifiers were studied widely as a means for overcoming exponential growth of internet traffic in the backbone network. We consider two approaches to excitation of erbium irons; One is core-pumping scheme, the other is cladding-pumping scheme. For a core-pumping configuration, we evaluate its applicability to future ultra long-haul network. In addition, we demonstrate that cladding-pumping configuration will enable reduction of power consumption, size, and cost because one multimode pumping laser diode can excite several cores simultaneously embedded in a common cladding and amplify several signals passed through the multi-core erbium-doped fiber cores.

In this study, a performance of a synchronous code division multiple access (CDMA) using the chaotic spreading sequences with constant power is estimated in indoor power line fading channels. It is found that, in the fading channels, as the number of simultaneous users increases, the chaotic spreading sequences realize better performance than the Walsh-Hadamard sequences in the synchronous CDMA.