This paper focuses on the problem of performance degradation in mismatched speech recognition. The F-Ratio analysis method is utilized to analyze the significance of different frequency bands for speech unit classification, and we find that frequencies around 1 kHz and 3 kHz, which are the upper bounds of the first and the second formants for most of the vowels, should be emphasized in comparison to the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC). The analysis result is further observed to be stable in several typical mismatched situations. Similar to the Mel-Frequency scale, another frequency scale called the F-Ratio-scale is thus proposed to optimize the filter bank design for the MFCC features, and make each subband contains equal significance for speech unit classification. Under comparable conditions, with the modified features we get a relative 43.20% decrease compared with the MFCC in sentence error rate for the emotion affected speech recognition, 35.54%, 23.03% for the noisy speech recognition at 15 dB and 0 dB SNR (signal to noise ratio) respectively, and 64.50% for the three years' 863 test data. The application of the F-Ratio analysis on the clean training set of the Aurora2 database demonstrates its robustness over languages, texts and sampling rates.

In this paper, we present the sexual dimorphism analysis in 3D human face and perform gender classification based on the result of sexual dimorphism analysis. Four types of features are extracted from a 3D human-face image. By using statistical methods, the existence of sexual dimorphism is demonstrated in 3D human face based on these features. The contributions of each feature to sexual dimorphism are quantified according to a novel criterion. The best gender classification rate is 94% by using SVMs and Matcher Weighting fusion method. This research adds to the knowledge of 3D faces in sexual dimorphism and affords a foundation that could be used to distinguish between male and female in 3D faces.

Usually the contact voltage drop or contact resistance of electromagnetic relays is observed only to identify if the contacts are failure or not on the manufactures' life tests. However, it is difficult to reveal the contact performance degradation because the variation of contact resistance may not be obvious. In this paper, a new life test technology was investigated to analyze the contact failure mechanisms and degenerative processes of electromagnetic relays by measuring their time parameters including closing time, opening time, over-travel time, rebound duration and gap time during each operation. Moreover, for the purpose of verifying the time parameters, the contact motion and contact morphology during life test were record by using a high speed camera. Both the variations of time parameters and information obtained from photos taken by high speed camera show that it involves three different degenerative phases during the whole life of a relay. The results also indicate this method is an effective technology to discriminate and diagnose the failure mechanisms for electromagnetic relays.

In a WSAN (Wireless Sensor and Actuator Network), most resources, including sensors and actuators, are designed for certain applications in a dedicated environment. Many researchers have proposed to use of gateways to infer and annotate heterogeneous data; however, such centralized methods produce a bottlenecking network and computation overhead on the gateways that causes longer response time in activity processing, worsening performance. This work proposes two distribution inference mechanisms: regionalized and sequential inference mechanisms to reduce the response time in activity processing. Finally, experimental results for the proposed inference mechanisms are presented, and it shows that our mechanisms outperform the traditional centralized inference mechanism.

In this letter, we propose a novel approach to estimate three different kinds of phone mismatch penalty matrices for two-stage keyword spotting. When the output of a phone recognizer is given, detection of a specific keyword is carried out through text matching with the phone sequences provided by the specified keyword using the proposed phone mismatch penalty matrices. The penalty matrices associated with substitution, insertion and deletion errors are estimated from the training data through deliberate error generation. The proposed approach has shown a significant improvement in a Korean continuous speech recognition task.

In this paper, a coexistence mechanism between IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11b, Active Channel Reservation for cOexiStence (ACROS), is proposed. The key idea underlining ACROS is to reserve the channel for IEEE 802.15.4 transmission, where IEEE 802.11 transmissions are forbidden. The request-to-send (RTS)/clear-to send (CTS) mechanism within IEEE 802.11 is used to reserve a channel. The proposed ACROS mechanism is implemented into a PC based prototype. The embedded version of ACROS is also developed to mitigate the timing drift problem in the PC-based ACROS. The efficiency of ACROS is shown using the throughput and packet error rate achieved in actual experiments.

Reflecting the rapid growth of information technology, the configuration of software applications such as word processors and spreadsheets is both sophisticated and complicated. It is often difficult for users to identify relevant functions in the online manual for a target application. In this paper, we propose a method for question answering that finds functions related to the user's request. To enhance our method, we addressed two "mismatch" problems. The first problem is associated with a mismatch in vocabulary, where the same concept is represented by different words in the manual and in the user's question. The second problem is associated with a mismatch in function. Although the user may have a hypothetical function for a purpose in mind, this purpose can sometimes be accomplished by other functions. To resolve these mismatch problems, we extract terms related to software functions from the Web, so that the user's question can be matched to the relevant function with high accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method experimentally.

This paper represents a feedback artificial immune system (FAIS). Inspired by the feedback mechanisms in the biological immune system, the proposed algorithm effectively manipulates the population size by increasing and decreasing B cells according to the diversity of the current population. Two kinds of assessments are used to evaluate the diversity aiming to capture the characteristics of the problem on hand. Furthermore, the processing of adding and declining the number of population is designed. The validity of the proposed algorithm is tested for several traveling salesman benchmark problems. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm when compared with the traditional genetic algorithm and an improved clonal selection algorithm.

An improved nonlinear circuit model for a GaAs Gunn diode in an oscillator is proposed based on the physical mechanism of the diode. This model interprets the nonlinear harmonic character on the Gunn diode. Its equivalent nonlinear circuit of which can assist in the design of the Gunn oscillator and help in the analysis of the fundamental and harmonic characteristics of the GaAs Gunn diode. The simulation prediction and the experiment of the Gunn oscillator show the feasibility of the nonlinear circuit model for the GaAs Gunn oscillator.

To support mobile multicasting in wireless networks, we present a new active multicasting mechanism which makes use of the state characteristic of multicast agent. In this mechanism, a multicast agent just locates the position for roaming hosts when it does not forward multicast packets. Upon reception of multicast packets, the multicast agent adjusts the service range to achieve an appropriate balance between routing efficiency and the overhead of multicast tree reconstruction. Therefore, a lot of unnecessary tree reconstructions are eliminated during the time when none multicast packet is transferred and multicast delivery path is near optimal because of the limited service range of multicast agent in the active state. To justify the effectiveness of our proposed scheme, we develop an analytical model to evaluate the signaling overhead. Our performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the system overhead and multicast routing is near optimal. The other important contribution is the novel analytical approach in evaluating the performance of mobile multicast routing protocol.

It is well known that the performance of CDMA systems may degrade in the presence of spreading code mismatch. The diagonal loading multiple constrained minimum variance (DL-MCMV) approaches have been proposed to deal with the mismatch problem. However, they still cannot improve the robust capability efficiently due to the spreading code mismatch. In this letter, a detector based on the variable DL technique is presented that offers more robust capabilities than the MCMV and DL-MCMV detectors. Computer simulation results are provided that illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed detector.

Generalized quasi-cyclic (GQC) codes form a wide and useful class of linear codes that includes thoroughly quasi-cyclic codes, finite geometry (FG) low density parity check (LDPC) codes, and Hermitian codes. Although it is known that the systematic encoding of GQC codes is equivalent to the division algorithm in the theory of Grobner basis of modules, there has been no algorithm that computes Grobner basis for all types of GQC codes. In this paper, we propose two algorithms to compute Grobner basis for GQC codes from their parity check matrices; we call them echelon canonical form algorithm and transpose algorithm. Both algorithms require sufficiently small number of finite-field operations with the order of the third power of code-length. Each algorithm has its own characteristic. The first algorithm is composed of elementary methods and is appropriate for low-rate codes. The second algorithm is based on a novel formula and has smaller computational complexity than the first one for high-rate codes with the number of orbits (cyclic parts) less than half of the code length. Moreover, we show that a serial-in serial-out encoder architecture for FG LDPC codes is composed of linear feedback shift registers with the size of the linear order of code-length; to encode a binary codeword of length n, it takes less than 2n adder and 2n memory elements.

We first consider a variant of the Schmidt-Samoa-Takagi encryption scheme without losing additively homomorphic properties. We show that this variant is secure in the sense of IND-CPA under the decisional composite residuosity assumption, and of OW-CPA under the assumption on the hardness of factoring n=p2q. Second, we introduce new algebraic properties "affine" and "pre-image restriction," which are closely related to homomorphicity. Intuitively, "affine" is a tuple of functions which have a special homomorphic property, and "pre-image restriction" is a function which can restrict the receiver to having information on the encrypted message. Then, we propose an encryption scheme with primitive power roots of unity in (Z/ns+1). We show that our scheme has, in addition to the additively homomorphic property, the above algebraic properties. In addition to the properties, we also show that the encryption scheme is secure in the sense of OW-CPA and IND-CPA under new number theoretic assumptions.

Electrical life is an important parameter to estimate the reliability of a relay, and it is greatly affected by load current. In order to shorten the time of life test, load current stress accelerated life tests were carried out by using a life test system designed for relay in this paper. During the life test, many parameters such as the contact resistance, the closing time and the over-travel time of relay were measured for each operation to identify the failure modes. After the life test, the failure mechanisms under each current stress, which cause the same failure mode, were analyzed by investigating the variations of parameters and observing the morphology of contact surface. In addition, for the purpose of further studying the consistency of failure mechanisms between different current stress, a Weibull statistical analysis was adopted to estimate the shape parameter of Weibull distribution because the same shape parameter means the same failure mechanism. Finally, a statistical model for estimating the lifetime under load current stress was built. The research methods and conclusions mentioned in this paper are meaningful to perform the accelerated life tests for other types of relays.

In direct-conversion orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) receivers, the impact of frequency-dependent I/Q mismatch (IQ-M) with carrier frequency offset (CFO) must be considered. A preamble-assisted estimation is developed to circumvent the frequency-dependent IQ-M with CFO. The results of a simulation and an experiment show that the proposed method could provide good estimation efficiency and enhance the system performance. Moreover, the proposed scheme is compatible with current wireless local area network standards.

There are two main methods for pandemic simulations: the SEIR model and the MAS model. The SEIR model can deal with simulations quickly for many homogeneous populations with simple ordinary differential equations; however, the model cannot accommodate many detailed conditions. The MAS model, the multi-agent simulation, can deal with detailed simulations under the many kinds of initial and boundary conditions with simple social network models. However, the computing cost will grow exponentially as the population size becomes larger. Thus, simulations in the large-scale model would hardly be realized unless supercomputers are available. By combining these two methods, we may perform the pandemic simulations in the large-scale model with lower costs. That is, the MAS model is used in the early stage of a pandemic simulation to determine the appropriate parameters to be used in the SEIR model. With these obtained parameters, the SEIR model may then be used. To investigate the validity of this combined method, we first compare the simulation results between the SEIR model and the MAS model. Simulation results of the MAS model and the SEIR model that uses the parameters obtained by the MAS model simulation are found to be close to each other.

Time-interleaving is an efficient approach to increase the effective sampling rate of the ΣΔ modulators, but time-interleaved (TI) ΣΔ modulators are sensitive to channel mismatch, which causes the quantization noise folded back into the band of interest. To reduce the folded noise caused by the channel mismatch of two-channel TI ΣΔ modulators, a low-power second-order two-channel TI ΣΔ modulator is proposed. The noise transfer function (NTF) of the modulator is a band-pass filter. By using this band-pass NTF, the folded noised can be reduced. The entire modulator can be implemented by employing three op-amps, which is beneficial for power consumption. The circuit of implementation for the proposed modulator is designed in 0.18 µm COMS technology. The proposed modulator can achieve a SNDR of 78.9 dB with a channel mismatch of 0.5% and a linear gradient mismatch of 0.4% for unity sampling capacitors. Monte Carlo simulation is done with a random Gaussian mismatch of 0.4% standard deviation for all capacitors, resulting in an average SNDR of 80.5 dB. It is indicated that the proposed TI modulator is insensitive to the channel mismatch. The total power consumption is 19.5 mW from a 1.8 V supply.

Recent progress in scaled CMOS technologies can enhance signal bandwidth and clock frequency of analog-digital mixed VLSIs. However, the inevitable reduction of supply voltage causes a signal voltage mismatch between a non-scaled analog chip and a scaled A-D mixed chip. To overcome this problem, we present a Delta-Amplifier (DeltAMP) which can handle larger signal amplitude than the supply voltage. DeltaAMP folds a delta signal of an input voltage within a window using a virtual ground amplifier, modulation switches and comparators. For reconstruction of the folded delta signal to the ordinal signal, Analog-Time-Digital conversion (ATD) was also proposed, in which pulse-width analog information obtained at the comparators in DeltAMP was converted to a digital signal by counting. A test chip of DeltAMP with ATD was designed and fabricated using a 90 nm CMOS technology. A 2 Vpp input voltage range and 50 µW power consumption were achieved by the measurements with a 0.5 V supply. High accuracy of 62 dB SNR was obtained at signal bandwidth of 120 kHz.

The ability of a modified bow-tie dipole antenna, which has an asymmetric-feed structure to operate at UHF-band (470-862 MHz) and dual ISM-band (2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz) is demonstrated. Experimental results indicate that the VSWR 2:1 bandwidths achieved were 125.7%, 8.2% and 23.6% at 660 MHz, 2.45 GHz and 5.5 GHz. The proposed modified bow-tie dipole exhibits a nearly omni-directional radiation pattern with very easy to fabricate structure, and so is suitable for various commercial wideband applications.

This paper presents a cache way enabling mechanism using branch target addresses. This mechanism uses branch prediction information to avoid the power consumption due to unnecessary cache way access by enabling only the cache way(s) that should be accessed. The proposed cache way enabling mechanism reduces the power consumption of the instruction cache by 63% without any performance degradation of the processor. An ARM1136 processor simulator and the Synopsys PrimeTime are used to perform the performance/power simulation and static timing analysis of the proposed mechanisms respectively.