Fast switching speed, low power consumption, and good stability are some of the important properties of spin transfer torque assisted voltage controlled magnetic anisotropy magnetic tunnel junction (STT-assisted VCMA-MTJ) which makes the non-volatile full adder (NV-FA) based on it attractive for Internet of Things. However, the effects of process variations on the performances of STT-assisted VCMA-MTJ and NV-FA will be more and more obvious with the downscaling of STT-assisted VCMA-MTJ and the improvement of chip integration. In this paper, a more accurate electrical model of STT-assisted VCMA-MTJ is established on the basis of the magnetization dynamics and the process variations in film growth process and etching process. In particular, the write voltage is reduced to 0.7 V as the film thickness is reduced to 0.9 nm. The effects of free layer thickness variation (γtf) and oxide layer thickness variation (γtox) on the state switching as well as the effect of tunnel magnetoresistance ratio variation (β) on the sensing margin (SM) are studied in detail. Considering that the above process variations follow Gaussian distribution, Monte Carlo simulation is used to study the effects of the process variations on the writing and output operations of NV-FA. The result shows that the state of STT-assisted VCMA-MTJ can be switched under -0.3%≤γtf≤6% or -23%≤γtox≤0.2%. SM is reduced by 16.0% with β increases from 0 to 30%. The error rates of writing ‘0’ in the NV-FA can be reduced by increasing Vb1 or increasing positive Vb2. The error rates of writing ‘1’ can be reduced by increasing Vb1 or decreasing negative Vb2. The reduction of the output error rates can be realized effectively by increasing the driving voltage (Vdd).

Although intervention practices like mindfulness meditation have proven effective in treating psychosis, there is no clarity on the mechanism of information propagation in the brain. In this study, we formulated a network optimization problem and searched for the optimal solution using Digital Annealer developed by Fujitsu Ltd. This is inspired by quantum computing and is effective in solving large-scale combinatorial optimization problems to find the information propagation pathway in the brain that contributes to the realization of mindfulness. Specifically, we defined the optimal network state as the state of the brain network that is considered to be associated with the mindfulness state. We formulated the problem into two network optimization problems — the minimum vertex-cover problem and the maximum-flow problem — to search for the information propagation pathway that is important for realizing the state. In the minimum vertex-cover problem, we aimed to identify brain regions that are important for the realization of the mindfulness state, and identified eight regions, including four that were suggested to be consistent with previous studies. We formulated the problem as a maximum-flow problem to identify the information propagation pathways in the brain that contribute to the activation of these four identified regions. As a result, approximately 30% of the connections in the brain network structure of this study were identified, and the pathway with the highest flow rate was considered to characterize the bottom-up emotion regulation during mindfulness. The findings of this study could be useful for more direct interventions in the context of mindfulness, which are being investigated by neurofeedback and other methods. This is because existing studies have not clarified the information propagation pathways that contribute to the realization of the brain network states that characterize mindfulness states. In addition, this approach may be useful as a methodology to identify information propagation pathways in the brain that contribute to the realization of higher-order human cognitive activities, such as mindfulness, within large-scale brain networks.

This paper shows structural optimal design of optical waveguide components utilizing an efficient 3D frequency-domain and 2D time-domain beam propagation method (BPM) with an alternating direction implicit (ADI) scheme. Usual optimal design procedure is based on iteration of numerical simulation, and total computational cost of the optimal design mainly depends on the efficiency of numerical analysis method. Since the system matrices are tridiagonal in the ADI-based BPM, efficient analysis and optimal design are available. Shape and topology optimal design shown in this paper is based on optimization of density distribution and sensitivity analysis to the density parameters. Computational methods of the sensitivity are shown in the case of using the 3D semi-vectorial and 2D time-domain BPM based on ADI scheme. The validity of this design approach is shown by design of optical waveguide components: mode converters, and a polarization beam splitter.

Connected cars generate a huge amount of Internet of Things (IoT) sensor information called Controller Area Network (CAN) data. Recently, there is growing interest in collecting CAN data from connected cars in a cloud system to enable life-critical use cases such as safe driving support. Although each CAN data packet is very small, a connected car generates thousands of CAN data packets per second. Therefore, real-time CAN data collection from connected cars in a cloud system is one of the most challenging problems in the current IoT. In this paper, we propose an Edge computing-enhanced network Redundancy Elimination service (EdgeRE) for CAN data collection. In developing EdgeRE, we designed a CAN data compression architecture that combines in-vehicle computers, edge datacenters and a public cloud system. EdgeRE includes the idea of hierarchical data compression and dynamic data buffering at edge datacenters for real-time CAN data collection. Across a wide range of field tests with connected cars and an edge computing testbed, we show that the EdgeRE reduces bandwidth usage by 88% and the number of packets by 99%.

Deep neural networks show good performance in image recognition, speech recognition, and pattern analysis. However, deep neural networks also have weaknesses, one of which is vulnerability to poisoning attacks. A poisoning attack reduces the accuracy of a model by training the model on malicious data. A number of studies have been conducted on such poisoning attacks. The existing type of poisoning attack causes misrecognition by one classifier. In certain situations, however, it is necessary for multiple models to misrecognize certain data as different specific classes. For example, if there are enemy autonomous vehicles A, B, and C, a poisoning attack could mislead A to turn to the left, B to stop, and C to turn to the right simply by using a traffic sign. In this paper, we propose a multi-targeted poisoning attack method that causes each of several models to misrecognize certain data as a different target class. This study used MNIST and CIFAR10 as datasets and Tensorflow as a machine learning library. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme has a 100% average attack success rate on MNIST and CIFAR10 when malicious data accounting for 5% of the training dataset have been used for training.

In order to increase communication capacity, the use of millimeter-wave and terahertz-wave bands are being actively explored. Non-radiative dielectric waveguide known as NRD guide is one of promising platform of millimeter-wave integrated circuits thanks to its non-radiative and low loss nature. In order to develop millimeter wave circuits with various functions, various circuit components have to be efficiently designed to meet requirements from application side. In this paper, for efficient design of NRD guide devices, we develop a topology optimal design technique based on function-expansion-method which can express arbitrary structure with arbitrary geometric topology. In the present approach, recently developed two-dimensional full-vectorial finite element method (2D-FVFEM) for NRD guide devices is employed to improve computational efficiency and several evolutionary approaches, which do not require appropriate initial structure depending on a given design problem, are used to optimize design variables, thus, NRD guide devices having desired functions are efficiently obtained without requiring designer's special knowledge.

With the popularity of smart devices, mobile crowdsensing, in which the crowdsensing platform gathers useful data from users of smart devices, e.g., smartphones, has become a prevalent paradigm. Various incentive mechanisms have been extensively adopted for the crowdsensing platform to incentivize users of smart devices to offer sensing data. Existing works have concentrated on rewarding smart-device users for their short term effort to provide data without considering the long-term factors of smart-device users and the quality of data. Our previous work has considered the quality of data of smart-device users by incorporating the long-term reputation of smart-device users. However, our previous work only considered a quality maximization problem with budget constraints on one location. In this paper, multiple locations are considered. Stackelberg game is utilized to solve a two-stage optimization problem. In the first stage, the crowdsensing platform allocates the budget to different locations and sets price as incentives for users to maximize the total data quality. In the second stage, the users make efforts to provide data to maximize its utility. Extensive numerical simulations are conducted to evaluate proposed algorithm.

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) enables the embedding of Virtualized Network Function (VNF) into commodity servers. A sequence of VNFs can be chained in a particular order to form a service chain (SC). This paper considers placing multiple SCs in a geo-distributed edge system owned by multiple service providers (SPs). For a pair of SC and SP, minimizing the placement cost while meeting a latency constraint is formulated as an integer programming problem. As SC clients and SPs are self-interested, we study the matching between SCs and SPs that respects individual's interests yet maximizes social welfare. The proposed matching approach excludes any blocking individual and block pair which may jeopardize the stability of the result. Simulation results show that the proposed approach performs well in terms of social welfare but is suboptimal concerning the number of placed SCs.

This paper introduces the working principle of continuous wave (CW) illuminator and selects the test space by developing the wave impedance selection algorithm for the CW illuminator. For the vertical polarization and the horizontal polarization of CW illuminator, the law of wave impedance distribution after loading is analyzed and the influence of loading distribution on test space selection is studied. The selection principle of wave impedance based on incident field or total field at the monitoring point is analyzed.

In [2], Choi et al. proposed an identity-based password-authenticated key exchange (iPAKE) protocol using the Boneh-Franklin IBE scheme, and its generic construction (UKAM-PiE) that was standardized in ISO/IEC 11770-4/AMD 1. In this paper, we show that the iPAKE and UKAM-PiE protocols are insecure against passive/active attacks by a malicious PKG (Private Key Generator) where the malicious PKG can find out all clients' passwords by just eavesdropping on the communications, and the PKG can share a session key with any client by impersonating the server. Then, we propose a strengthened PAKE (for short, SPAIBE) protocol with IBE, which prevents such a malicious PKG's passive/active attacks. Also, we formally prove the security of the SPAIBE protocol in the random oracle model and compare relevant PAKE protocols in terms of efficiency, number of passes, and security against a malicious PKG.

Enterprises have paid attention to consortium blockchains like Hyperledger Fabric, which is one of the most promising platforms, for efficient decentralized transactions without depending on any particular organization. A consortium blockchain-based system will be typically built across multiple organizations. In such blockchain-based systems, system operations across multiple organizations in a decentralized manner are essential to maintain the value of introducing consortium blockchains. Decentralized system operations have recently been becoming realistic with the evolution of consortium blockchains. For instance, the release of Hyperledger Fabric v2.x, in which individual operational tasks for a blockchain network, such as command execution of configuration change of channels (Fabric's sub-networks) and upgrade of chaincodes (Fabric's smart contracts), can be partially executed in a decentralized manner. However, the operations workflows also include the preceding procedure of pre-sharing, coordinating, and pre-agreeing the operational information (e.g., configuration parameters) among organizations, after which operation executions can be conducted, and this preceding procedure relies on costly manual tasks. To realize efficient decentralized operations workflows for consortium blockchain-based systems in general, we propose a decentralized inter-organizational operations method that we call Operations Smart Contract (OpsSC), which defines an operations workflow as a smart contract. Furthermore, we design and implement OpsSC for blockchain network operations with Hyperledger Fabric v2.x. This paper presents OpsSC for operating channels and chaincodes, which are essential for managing the blockchain networks, through clarifying detailed workflows of those operations. A cost evaluation based on an estimation model shows that the total operational cost for executing a typical operational scenario to add an organization to a blockchain network having ten organizations could be reduced by 54 percent compared with a conventional script-based method. The implementation of OpsSC has been open-sourced and registered as one of Hyperledger Labs projects, which hosts experimental projects approved by Hyperledger.

5G has achieved large-scale commercialization across the world and the global 6G research and development is accelerating. To support more new use cases, 6G mobile communication systems should satisfy extreme performance requirements far beyond 5G. The physical layer key technologies are the basis of the evolution of mobile communication systems of each generation, among which three key technologies, i.e., duplex, waveform and multiple access, are the iconic characteristics of mobile communication systems of each generation. In this paper, we systematically review the development history and trend of the three key technologies and define the Non-Orthogonal Physical Layer (NOPHY) concept for 6G, including Non-Orthogonal Duplex (NOD), Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) and Non-Orthogonal Waveform (NOW). Firstly, we analyze the necessity and feasibility of NOPHY from the perspective of capacity gain and implementation complexity. Then we discuss the recent progress of NOD, NOMA and NOW, and highlight several candidate technologies and their potential performance gain. Finally, combined with the new trend of 6G, we put forward a unified physical layer design based on NOPHY that well balances performance against flexibility, and point out the possible direction for the research and development of 6G physical layer key technologies.

Towards realization of a noise-induced synchronization in a natural environment, an experimental study is carried out using the Van der Pol oscillator circuit. We focus on acoustic sounds as a potential source of noise that may exist in nature. To mimic such a natural environment, white noise sounds were generated from a loud speaker and recorded into microphone signals. These signals were then injected into the oscillator circuits. We show that the oscillator circuits spontaneously give rise to synchronized dynamics when the microphone signals are highly correlated with each other. As the correlation among the input microphone signals is decreased, the level of synchrony is lowered monotonously, implying that the input correlation is the key determinant for the noise-induced synchronization. Our study provides an experimental basis for synchronizing clocks in distributed sensor networks as well as other engineering devices in natural environment.

The Euclidean projection operation is the most complex and time-consuming of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) decoding algorithms, resulting in a large number of resources when deployed on hardware platforms. We propose a simplified line segment projection algorithm (SLSA) and present the hardware design and the quantization scheme of the SLSA. In simulation results, the proposed SLSA module has a better performance than the original algorithm with the same fixed bitwidths due to the centrosymmetric structure of SLSA. Furthermore, the proposed SLSA module with a simpler structure without hypercube projection can reduce time consuming by up to 72.2% and reduce hardware resource usage by more than 87% compared to other Euclidean projection modules in the experiments.

In this paper, we propose a selective membership inference attack method that determines whether certain data corresponding to a specific class are being used as training data for a machine learning model or not. By using the proposed method, membership or non-membership can be inferred by generating a decision model from the prediction of the inference models and training the confidence values for the data corresponding to the selected class. We used MNIST as an experimental dataset and Tensorflow as a machine learning library. Experimental results show that the proposed method has a 92.4% success rate with 5 inference models for data corresponding to a specific class.

Zero-shot slot filling is a domain adaptation approach to handle unseen slots in new domains without training instances. Previous studies implemented zero-shot slot filling by predicting both slot entities and slot types. Because of the lack of knowledge about new domains, the existing methods often fail to predict slot entities for new domains as well as cannot effectively predict unseen slot types even when slot entities are correctly identified. Moreover, for some seen slot types, those methods may suffer from the domain shift problem, because the unseen context in new domains may change the explanations of the slots. In this study, we propose intrinsic representations to alleviate the domain shift problems above. Specifically, we propose a multi-relation-based representation to capture both the general and specific characteristics of slot entities, and an ontology-based representation to provide complementary knowledge on the relationships between slots and values across domains, for handling both unseen slot types and unseen contexts. We constructed a two-step pipeline model using the proposed representations to solve the domain shift problem. Experimental results in terms of the F1 score on three large datasets—Snips, SGD, and MultiWOZ 2.3—showed that our model outperformed state-of-the-art baselines by 29.62, 10.38, and 3.89, respectively. The detailed analysis with the average slot F1 score showed that our model improved the prediction by 25.82 for unseen slot types and by 10.51 for seen slot types. The results demonstrated that the proposed intrinsic representations can effectively alleviate the domain shift problem for both unseen slot types and seen slot types with unseen contexts.

Federated learning is a promising strategy for indoor localization that can reduce the labor cost of constructing a fingerprint dataset in a distributed training manner without privacy disclosure. However, the traffic generated during the whole training process of federated learning is a burden on the up-and-down link, which leads to huge energy consumption for mobile devices. Moreover, the non-independent and identically distributed (Non-IID) problem impairs the global localization performance during the federated learning. This paper proposes a communication-efficient FedAvg method for federated indoor localization which is improved by the layerwise asynchronous aggregation strategy and layerwise swapping training strategy. Energy efficiency can be improved by performing asynchronous aggregation between the model layers to reduce the traffic cost in the training process. Moreover, the impact of the Non-IID problem on the localization performance can be mitigated by performing swapping training on the deep layers. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed methods reduce communication traffic and improve energy efficiency significantly while mitigating the impact of the Non-IID problem on the precision of localization.

Bolts in the bogie box of metro vehicles are fasteners which are significant for bogie box structure. Effective loosening bolts detection in early stage can avoid the bolt loss and accident occurrence. Recently, detection methods based on machine vision are developed for bolt loosening. But traditional image processing and machine learning methods have high missed rate and false rate for bolts detection due to the small size and complex background. To address this problem, a loosening bolts defection method based on deep learning is proposed. The proposed method cascades two stages in a coarse-to-fine manner, including location stage based on the Single Shot Multibox Detector (SSD) and the improved SSD sequentially localizing the bogie box and bolts and a semantic segmentation stage with the U-shaped Network (U-Net) to detect the looseness of the bolts. The accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method are verified with images captured from the Shanghai Metro Line 9. The results show that the proposed method has a higher accuracy in detecting the bolts loosening, which can guarantee the stable operation of the metro vehicles.

In the Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations scenarios, KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is a very important operation and maintenance monitoring indicator, and research on KPI anomaly detection has also become a hot spot in recent years. Aiming at the problems of low detection efficiency and insufficient representation learning of existing methods, this paper proposes a fast clustering-based KPI anomaly detection method HCE-DWL. This paper firstly adopts the combination of hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) and deep assignment based on CNN-Embedding (CE) to perform cluster analysis (that is HCE) on KPI data, so as to improve the clustering efficiency of KPI data, and then separately the centroid of each KPI cluster and its Transformed Outlier Scores (TOS) are given weights, and finally they are put into the LightGBM model for detection (the Double Weight LightGBM model, referred to as DWL). Through comparative experimental analysis, it is proved that the algorithm can effectively improve the efficiency and accuracy of KPI anomaly detection.

Service chaining is attracting attention as a promising technology for providing a variety of network services by applying virtual network functions (VNFs) that can be instantiated on commercial off-the-shelf servers. The data transmission for each service chain has to satisfy the quality of service (QoS) requirements in terms of the loss probability and transmission delay, and hence the amount of resources for each VNF is expected to be sufficient for satisfying the QoS. However, the increase in the amount of VNF resources results in a high cost for improving the QoS. To reduce the cost of utilizing a VNF, sharing VNF instances through multiple service chains is an effective approach. However, the number of packets arriving at the VNF instance is increased, resulting in a degradation of the QoS. It is therefore important to select VNF instances shared by multiple service chains and to determine the amount of resources for the selected VNFs. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective service chain construction with a VNF sharing model. In the proposed method, each VNF is modeled as an M/M/1/K queueing model to evaluate the relationship between the amount of resources and the loss probability. The proposed method determines the VNF sharing, the VNF placement, the amount of resources for each VNF, and the transmission route of each service chain. For the optimization problem, these are applied according to our proposed heuristic algorithm. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method through a simulation. From the numerical examples, we show the effectiveness of the proposed method under certain network topologies.