Congestion control in the Internet consists of two main components: the TCP Additive-Increase Multiplicative-Decrease (AIMD) mechanism on sending windows implemented by end-users, and the Active Queue Management (AQM) scheme implemented in the routers which improves the effectiveness of congestion control. TCP connection is regarded as a feedback control system. Comparably, AQM is classified as a flow controller. There are several kinds of time delays in the network, such as propagation delay, queuing delay in the buffer of the router, etc. The time delays cause degradation of performance and instability of the network. A Smith Predictor is commonly used in feedback control of plants with significant time delays to implement effective compensation. In this paper, a Smith Predictor-based PI-controller for AQM (SPPA) is proposed, which uses a TCP reference model and an average Round-Trip Time (RTT) to reduce unfavorable effects of time delays in TCP networks. The drop probability is calculated by a Proportional-Integral (PI) controller based on the prediction error. When a mismatch exists in between the actual model of the TCP process and the reference model employed by the SPPA, we demonstrate conditions under which the network is stable. The performance, robustness and effectiveness of the proposed SPPA are all evaluated using simulations. The performance of the SPPA is compared with some typical AQMs, such as the Adaptive RED, the PI-controller, and the Proportional-Differential (PD) controller.

This paper highlights some of our recent research efforts in designing and evaluating life-like characters that are capable of entertaining affective and social communication with human users. The key novelty of our approach is the use of human physiological information: first, as a method to evaluate the effect of life-like character behavior on a moment-to-moment basis, and second, as an input modality for a new generation of interface agents that we call 'physiologically perceptive' life-like characters. By exploiting the stream of primarily involuntary human responses, such as autonomic nervous system activity or eye movements, those characters are expected to respond to users' affective and social needs in a truly sensitive, and hence effective, friendly, and beneficial way.

Eye contact is an effective means of controlling human communication, such as in starting communication. It seems that we can make eye contact if we simply look at each other. However, this alone does not establish eye contact. Both parties also need to be aware of being watched by the other. We propose a method of bidirectional eye contact satisfying these conditions for human-robot communication. When a human wants to start communication with a robot, he/she watches the robot. If it finds a human looking at it, the robot turns to him/her, changing its facial expressions to let him/her know its awareness of his/her gaze. When the robot wants to initiate communication with a particular person, it moves its body and face toward him/her and changes its facial expressions to make the person notice its gaze. We show several experimental results to prove the effectiveness of this method. Moreover, we present a robot that can recognize hand gestures after making eye contact with the human to show the usefulness of eye contact as a means of controlling communication.

In this letter, we propose a protocol sensitive random early detection algorithm for active queue management to improve fairness between TCP and UDP flows and to reduce delay time with small overheads. The algorithm classifies the packets into responsive and unresponsive flows, and applies the RED algorithm individually to each classified group. Using ns-2 simulations, we showed the effectiveness of the proposed PSRED algorithm compared with several well-known AQM schemes, such as RED and RED-PD algorithms.

We show that distributed source coding of multi-view images in camera sensor networks (CSNs) using adaptive modules can come close to the Slepian-Wolf bound. In a systematic scenario with limited node abilities, work by Slepian and Wolf suggest that it is possible to encode statistically dependent signals in a distributed manner to the same rate as with a system where the signals are jointly encoded. We considered three nodes (PN, CN and CNs), which are statistically depended. Different distributed architecture solutions are proposed based on a parent node and child node framework. A PN sends the whole image whereas a CNs/CN only partially, using an adaptive coding based on adaptive module-operation at a rate close to theoretical bound - H(CNs|PN)/H(CN|PN,CNs). CNs sends sub-sampled image and encodes the rest of image, however CN encodes all image. In other words, the proposed scheme allows independent encoding and jointly decoding of views. Experimental results show performance close to the information-theoretic limit. Furthermore, good performance of the proposed architecture with adaptive scheme shows significant improvement over previous work.

The authors propose a system for searching the shape of human hands and fingers in real time and with high accuracy, without using any special peripheral equipment such as range sensor, PC cluster, etc., by a method of retrieving similar image quickly with high accuracy from a large volume of image database containing the complicated shapes and self-occlusions. In designing the system, we constructed a database in a way to be adaptable even to differences among individuals, and searched CG images of hand similar to unknown hand image, through extraction of characteristics using high-order local autocorrelational patterns, reduction of the amount of characteristics centering on principal component analysis, and prior rearrangement of data corresponding to the amount of characteristics. As a result of experiments, our system performed high-accuracy estimation of human hand shape where mean error was 7 degrees in finger joint angles, with the processing speed of 30 fps or over.

Adaptive Virtual Queue (AVQ) introduces a novel implementation algorithm for Active Queue Management (AQM). The stability criterion for AVQ was deduced in literature [1], but it lacks practicability due to the difficulty of solving the transcendental equation. In this letter, the AVQ stability is further investigated based on the characteristic roots of delay-differential equation. Another stability criterion explicitly associated with parameters of network configuration is deduced and the upper bound of delay time for stable AVQ algorithm is determined. Finally, the conclusion is validated through simulation experiments.

In this paper, we provide various perspectives related to wireless sensor and mobile ad hoc networking research. We reveal their commonalities and differences and suggest the need for participation from the computer science community, in addition to communications and protocols. In particular, we reveal the various issues that demand deeper investigation, collaborative research, and standardization. We introduced the aim, structure, objectives, and goals of the World Wireless Research Forum (WWRF) and highlight the activities conducted by the WWRF Working Group 3. Finally, we discuss the status of various standardization efforts and present new research issues and challenges.

TCP performance in the IEEE 802.11-based multihop ad hoc networks is extremely poor, because the congestion control mechanism of TCP cannot effectively deal with the problem of packet drops caused by mobility and shared channel contention among wireless nodes. In this paper, we present a cross-layer method, which adaptively adjusts the TCP maximum window size according to the number of RTS (Request To Send) retry counts of the MAC layer at the TCP sender, to control the number of TCP packets in the network and thus decrease the channel contention. Our simulation results show that this method can remarkably improve TCP throughput and its stability.

This paper presents an adaptive control design for the ABR traffic congestion control in ATM networks. Firstly, we consider a control-based mathematical model to the ABR traffic congestion control problem. Then the feedback pole placement control design is applied to the ATM ABR traffic congestion control problem for the case of known delays. Finally, by using the online plant parameter estimation algorithm and modifying the controller parameters adaptively in real time, a method to treat the case of unknown time-varying delays is proposed. Several design modifications are introduced to solve practical control issues such as bounded command rate constraint, output buffer saturation and bounded values to the plant parameter estimation algorithm. Simulations are implemented to verify the proposed control design. It is shown that while considering these practical control issues, the control method satisfies the requirements of fairness to users, network efficiency, unknown time-varying delays, queue length control and good convergence performance at an acceptable computation effort.

In multicast congestion control, the receiver of the worst congestion level is selected as the representative and transmission rate of the sender is adjusted to TCP throughput of the representative. This approach has high scalability and TCP friendliness. However, when this approach is applied in wireless communications, wireless-caused packet loss will cause to frequent change of the representative. This is because degradation of wireless channel quality causes bursty packet loss at a corresponding receiver. Fading, one of main reasons of wireless channel degradation, is expected to be recovered after short time period, which leads to frequent change of the representative. This frequent change of representative makes the sender adjust its transmission rate to the tentative worst receiver, which brings severe performance degradation to wireless multicast. We call this technical problem, the wireless-caused representative selection fluctuation problem. Wireless-caused representative selection fluctuation problem is one of scalability problems in the wireless multicast, because this problem remarkably happens for large scale multicast. We propose two possible solutions for this problem, an end-to-end approach and a network support approach. Performance evaluation in various situation show that an end-to-end approach is sensitive for its inferring error but a network support approach shows good performance improvement.

We propose a modified Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with a view to improve gesture recognition using a moving camera. The conventional HMM is formulated so as to deal with only one feature candidate per frame. However, for a mobile robot, the background and the lighting conditions are always changing, and the feature extraction problem becomes difficult. It is almost impossible to extract a reliable feature vector under such conditions. In this paper, we define a new gesture recognition framework in which multiple candidates of feature vectors are generated with confidence measures and the HMM is extended to deal with these multiple feature vectors. Experimental results comparing the proposed system with feature vectors based on DCT and the method of selecting only one candidate feature point verifies the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

In VDSM era, crosstalk is becoming a more and more vital factor in high performance VLSI designs, making noise mitigation in early design stages necessary. In this paper, we propose an effective algorithm optimizing crosstalk under congestion constraint in the layer assignment stage. A new model for noise severity measurement is developed where wire length is used as a scale for the noise immunity, and both capacitive and inductive coupling between sensitive nets are considered. We also take shield insertion into account for further crosstalk mitigation. Experimental results show that our approach could efficiently reduce crosstalk noise without compromising congestion compared to the algorithm proposed in [1].

There have been many arguments that the underlying structure of natural languages is beyond the descriptive capacity of context-free languages. A well-known example is tree adjoining grammars; less common are spine grammars, linear indexed grammars, head grammars, and combinatory categorial grammars. It is known that these models of grammars have the same generative power of string languages and fall into the class of mildly context-sensitive grammars. For an automaton, it is known that the class of languages accepted by transfer pushdown automata is exactly the class of linear indexed languages. In this paper, deterministic transfer pushdown automata is introduced. We will show that the language accepted by a deterministic transfer pushdown automaton is generated by an unambiguous spine grammar. Moreover, we will show that there exists an inherently ambiguous language.

Embedded systems are used in broad fields. They are one of the indispensable and fundamental technologies in a highly informative society in recent years. As embedded systems are large-scale and complicated, it is prosperous to design and develop a system LSI (Large Scale Integration). The structure of the system LSI has been increasing complexity every year. The degree of improvement of its design productivity has not caught up with the degree of its complexity by conventional methods or techniques. Hence, an idea for the design of a system LSI which has the flow of describing specifications of a system in UML (Unified Modeling Language) and then designing the system in a system level language has already proposed. It is important to establish how to convert from UML to a system level language in specification description or design with the idea. This paper proposes, extracts and verifies transformation rules from UML to SpecC which is one of system level languages. SpecC code has been generated actually from elements in diagrams in UML based on the rules. As an example to verify the rules, "headlights control system of a car" is adopted. SpecC code has been generated actually from elements in diagrams in UML based on the rules. It has been confirmed that the example is executed correctly in simulations. By using the transformation rules proposed in this paper, specification and implementation of a system can be connected seamlessly. Hence, it can improve the design productivity of a system LSI and the productivity of embedded systems.

The Internet has become an important medium for effective marketing and efficient operations for many institutions. Visitors of a particular web site leave behind valuable information on their preferences, requirements, and demands regarding the offered products and/or services. Understanding these requirements online, i.e., during a particular visit, is both a difficult technical challenge and a tremendous business opportunity. Web sites that can provide effective online navigation suggestions to their visitors can exploit the potential inherent in the data such visits generate every day. However, identifying, collecting, and maintaining the necessary knowledge that navigation suggestions are based on is far from trivial. We propose a methodology for acquiring and maintaining this knowledge efficiently using data mart and web mining technology. Its effectiveness has been shown in an application for a bank's web site.

We have developed a visualization system for dialog text exchanged in e-learning virtual classrooms. In this system, text-based online discussions among learners are effectively visualized as discussions held in a virtual classroom in cyberspace. Discussion participants are displayed as avatars. The virtual classroom maintains the interest of learners because it incorporates professional camerawork and switching know-how based on rules derived from an analysis of 42 TV programs. The gestures of the CG avatar depend on the dialog text. A series of virtual classroom experiments confirmed that elementary and junior high school students maintained an interest in using the system.

In this paper, we propose a global routing method for 2-layer BGA packages. In our routing model, the global routing for each net is uniquely determined by a via assignment of each net. Our global routing method starts from an initial monotonic via assignment and incrementally improves the via assignment to optimize the total wire length and the wire congestion. Experimental results show that our proposed method generates a better global routing efficiently.

Active Queue Management (AQM) can maintain smaller queuing delay and higher throughput by purposefully dropping packets at the intermediate nodes. Most of the existing AQM schemes follow the probability dropping mechanism originated from Random Early Detection (RED). In this paper, we develop a novel packet dropping mechanism for AQM through designing a two-category classifier based on the Fisher Linear Discriminate approach. The simulation results show that the new scheme outperforms other well-known AQM schemes, such as RED, AdaptiveRED, AVQ, PI, REM etc., in the integrated performance. Additionally, our mechanism is simple since it requires few CPU cycles, which makes it suitable for the high-speed routers.

We propose a sea surveillance system that automatically detects intruding objects in the sea. The difficulty with an automatic system is detecting objects such as moving boats while reducing false positives caused by some waves and reflections in the sea. A false positive is reporting an object which doesn't actually exist, while a false negative is a failure in detecting an intruding object. Firstly, we identify factors of false positives. Secondly, we propose a new surveillance system considering these factors. Our proposed system combines three detecting methods. The first method is detection of Differences between Surveillance images and Flapping Reference images (DSFR). The second method is detection of Contours from Averaging images (CA). The third method is Silhouette object Detection (SD). The combination of DSFR and CA detects various moving objects under normal light conditions, while SD detects objects under backlight conditions. Finally we apply our proposed method to actual situations. Our proposed method detected boats while reducing false positives effectively.