This paper was written for LSI engineers in order to demonstrate the effect of optical interconnections in LSIs to improve both the speed and power performances of 0.5 and 0.2 µm CMOS microprocessors. The feasibilities and problems regarding new micronsize optoelectronic devices as well as associated electronics are discussed. Actual circuit structures clocks and bus lines used for optical interconnection are discussed. Newly designed optical interconnections and the speed power performances are compared with those of the original electrical interconnection systems.

It is difficult to decide whether or not a given cryptographic protocol is secure even though the cryptographic algorithm used for the protocol is assumed to be secure. We have proposed an algorithm to decide the security of cryptographic protocols under several conditions. In this paper, we review our algorithm and report a system to verify the security. The system has be implemented on a computer. By using this system, we have verified the security of several protocols efficiently.

This paper presents two methods for securely realizing caller-authenticated and callee-specified calls over telecommunication networks with terminals that accept IC cards having KPS-based cryptographic functions. In the proposed protocols, users can verify that the partner is the proper owner of a certain ID or a certain pen name. Users' privacy is protected even if they do the caller-authenticated and callee-specified calls and do not pay their telephone charge in advance.

This paper describes design issues of a speech dialogue system, the evaluation of the system, and the data collection of spontaneous speech in a transportation guidance domain. As it is difficult to collect spontaneous speech and to use a real system for the collection and evaluation, the phenomena related with dialogues have not been quantitatively clarified yet. The authors constructed a speech dialogue system which operates in almost real time, with acceptable recognition accuracy and flexible dialogue control. The system was used for spontaneous speech collection in a transportation guidance domain. The system performance evaluated in the domain is the understanding rate of 84.2% for the utterances within the predefined grammar and the lexicon. Also some statistics of the spontaneous speech collected are given.

A new direct projection patterning technique of aluminum using synchrotron radiation (SR) is proposed. It is based on the thermal reaction control effect of SR excitation. In the case of the Si surface, pure thermal growth is possible at 200, however, this growth is suppressed perfectly by SR irradiation. On the other hand, Al growth on the SiO2 surface is impossible at the same temperature thermally, however, SR has an effect to initiate thermal reaction. Both new effects of SR, suppression and initiation, are clarified to be caused by atomic order level thin layers formed from CVD gases by SR excitation on the surfaces. By using these effects, the direct inverse and normal projection patterning of Al are successfully demonstrated.

This paper presents a new concept in cryptography called the sibling intractable function family (SIFF) which has the property that given a set of initial strings colliding with one another, it is computationally infeasible to find another string that would collide with the initial strings. The various concepts behind SIFF are presented together with a construction of SIFF from any one-way function. Applications of SIFF to many practical problems are also discussed. These include the hierarchical access control problem which is a long-standing open problem induced by a paper of Akl and Taylor about ten years ago, the shared mail box problem, access control in distributed systems and the multiple message authentication problem.

In this paper, we investigate the round complexity of zero-knowledge interactive proof systems of possession of knowledge, and mainly show that if a relation R has a three move blackbox simulation zero-knowledge interactive proof system of possession of knowledge, then there exists a probabilistic polynomial time algorithm that on input x{0,1}*, outputs y such that (x,y)R with overwhelming probability if xdom R, and outputs "" with probability 1 if x dom R. The result above can not be generalized to zero-knowledge interactive proof systems of possession of knowledge with more than four moves, because it is known that there exists a "four" move blackbox simulation perfect zero-knowledge interactive proof system of possession of knowledge for a nontrivial relation R.

The basic operation in elliptic cryptosystems is the computation of a multiple dP of a point P on the elliptic curve modulo n. We propose a fast and systematic method of reducing the number of operations over elliptic curves. The proposed method is based on pre-computation to generate an adequate addition-subtraction chain for multiplier the d. By increasing the average length of zero runs in a signed binary representation of d, we can speed up the window method. Formulating the time complexity of the proposed method makes clear that the proposed method is faster than other methods. For example, for d with length 512 bits, the proposed method requires 602.6 multiplications on average. Finally, we point out that each addition/subtraction over the elliptic curve using homogeneous coordinates can be done in 3 multiplications if parallel processing is allowed.

Reduction in the illumination wavelength for exposure leads to higher resolution while keeping the depth of focus. Thus, KrF excimer laser lithography has been positioned as the next generation lithography tool behind g/i-line optical lithography, and many studies have been investigated. In the early days, the excimer laser lithography had many inherent problems, such as inadequate reliability, difficult maintainability, high operating cost, and low resolution and sensitivity of resist materials. However, the performance of the excimer laser stepper has been improved and chemical amplification resists have been developed for the past decade. At present, KrF excimer lithography has reached the level of trial manufacturing of lower submicron ULSI devices beyond 64 Mbit DRAMs.

In this paper, we propose an extended LR parsing algorithm, called LR parsing with a category reachability test (the LR-CRT algorithm). The LR-CRT algorithm enables a parser to efficiently recognize those sentences that belong to a specified grammatical category. The key point of the algorithm is to use an augmented LR parsing table in which each action entry contains a set of reachable categories. When executing a shift or reduce action, the parser checks whether the action can reach a given category using the augmented table. We apply the LR-CRT algorithm to improve a speech recognition system based on two-level LR parsing. This system uses two kinds of grammars, inter- and intra-phrase grammars, to recognize Japanese sentential speech. Two-level LR parsing guides the search of speech recognition through two-level symbol prediction, phrase category prediction and phone prediction, based on these grammars. The LR-CRT algorithm makes possible the efficient phone prediction based on the phrase category prediction. The system was evaluated using sentential speech data uttered phrase by phrase, and attained a word accuracy of 97.5% and a sentence accuracy of 91.2%

This paper discusses three approaches for combining an efficient LR parser and phoneme-context-dependent HMMs and compares them through continuous speech recognition experiments. In continuous speech recognition, phoneme-context-dependent allophonic models are considered very helpful for enhancing the recognition accuracy. They precisely represent allophonic variations caused by the difference in phoneme-contexts. With grammatical constraints based on a context free grammar (CFG), a generalized LR parser is one of the most efficient parsing algorithms for speech recognition. Therefore, the combination of allophonic models and a generalized LR parser is a powerful scheme enabling accurate and efficient speech recognition. In this paper, three phoneme-context-dependent LR parsing algorithms are proposed, which make it possible to drive allophonic HMMs. The algorithms are outlined as follows: (1) Algorithm for predicting the phonemic context dynamically in the LR parser using a phoneme-context-independent LR table. (2) Algorithm for converting an LR table into a phoneme-context-dependent LR table. (3) Algorithm for converting a CFG into a phoneme-context-dependent CFG. This paper also includes discussion of the results of recognition experiments, and a comparison of performance and efficiency of these three algorithms.

Formation of thin insulating SiO2 films by anodic oxidation of silicon was studied as a part of investigating an alternative method of fabricating low-cost silicon MIS solar cells. Anodization in the constant-voltage mode was carried out in nonaqueous ethylene glycol solution. The film thickness was carefully measured using an ellipsometer of wavelength 6238 . MIS cell performance was evaluated by comparing the open circuit voltage VOC and the short circuit current density ISC with those of the bare Schottky cell (without anodization) under illumination by a tungsten lamp. It was found that anodization in the constant-voltage mode can increase VOC without reducing ISC, and that anodization in the constant-voltage mode is more controllable and reproducible. The optimun formation voltage which gives the maximum VOC of the MIS cell depends on the forming voltage of oxide. A brief discussion on the mechanism for VOC increase is given.

Progress of speech recognition based on the hidden Markov model has made it possible to realize man-machine dialogue systems capable of operating in real time. In spite of considerable effort, however, few systems have been successfully developed because of the lack of appropriate dialogue models. This paper reports on some of technology necessary to develop a dialogue system with which one can converse comfortably. The emphasis is placed on the following three points: how a human converses with a machine; how errors of speech recognition can be recovered through conversation; and what it means for a machine to be cooperative. We examine the first problem by investigating dialogues between human speakers, and dialogues between a human speaker and a simulated machine. As a consideration in the design of dialogue control, we discuss the relation between efficiency and cooperativeness of dialogue, the method for confirming what the machine has recognized, and dynamic adaptation of the machine. Thirdly, we review the research on the friendliness of a natural language interface, mainly concerning the exchange of initiative, corrective and suggestive answers, and indirect questions. Lastly, we describe briefly the current state of the art in speech recognition and synthesis, and suggest what should be done for acceptance of spontaneous speech and production of a voice suitable to the output of a dialogue system.

The performance of an enciphered B+-tree can be improved by the selective encryption of the components of the nodes in the tree. This paper suggests an approach to the selective encryption of nodes in a B+-tree and a method to substitute the plaintext search keys in order to increase the security of the tree. The method is based on structures in combinatorial block designs, and it allows for faster traversal of the tree, hence improving the overall speed of query responses. It also represents a trade-off between security and performance in that the substitution method affords less security compared to encryption. However, assuming the use of a secure cryptosystem with parameters which are kept secret, the encrypted state of the data pointers and data blocks still prevents an intruder from accessing the stored data. The method based on block designs has the advantage of requiring only a small amount of information being kept secret. This presents a considerable savings in terms of space used to hold security-related information.

The security problems of object-oriented database system are investigated and security level assignment constraints and an access control mechanism based on the multilevel access control security policy are proposed. The proposed mechanism uses the Trusted Computing Base. A unique feature of the mechanism is that security levels are assigned not only to data items (objects), but also to methods and methods are not shown to the users whose security level is lower than that of the methods. And we distinguish between the security level of a variable in a class and that in an instance and distinguish between the level of an object when it is taken by itself and it is taken as a variable or an element of another complex object. All of this realizes the policy of multilevel access control.

In this paper a recursive form of Welch-Berlekamp (W-B) algorithm is provided which is a novel and fast decoding algorithm.

In speech recognition systeme dealing with unlimited vocabulary and based on stochastic language models, when the target recognition task is changed, recognition performance decreases because the language model is no longer appropriate. This paper describes two approaches for adapting a specific/general syllable trigram model to a new task. One uses a amall amount of text data similar to the target task, and the other uses supervised learning using the most recent input phrases and similar text. In this paper, these adaptation methods are called preliminary learning" and successive learning", respectively. These adaptation are evaluated using syllable perplexity and phrase recognition rates. The perplexity was reduced from 24.5 to 14.3 for the adaptation using 1000 phrases of similar text by preliminary learning, and was reduced to 12.1 using 1000 phrases including the 100 most recent phrases by successive learning. The recognition rates were also improved from 42.3% to 51.3% and 52.9%, respectively. Text similarity for the approaches is also studied in this paper.

We define the communication complexity of a perfect zero-knowledge interactive proof (ZKIP) as the expected number of bits communicated to achieve the given error probabilities (of both the completeness and the soundness). While the round complexity of ZKIPs has been studied greatly, no progress has been made for the communication complexity of those. This paper shows a perfect ZKIP whose communication complexity is 11/12 of that of the standard perfect ZKIP for a specific class of Quadratic Residuosity.

We studied the manner of clarification and verification in real dialogs and developed a spoken dialog system that can cope with the disambiguation of meanings of user input utterances. We analyzed content, query types and responses of human clarification queries. In human-human communications, ten percent of all sentences are concerned with meaning clarification. Therefore, in human-machine communications, we believe it is important that the machine verifies ambiguities occurring in dialog processing. We propose an architecture for a dialog system with this capability. Also, we have investigated the source of ambiguities in dialog processing and methods of dialog clarification for each part of the dialog system.

A context-sensitive method to predict linguistic expressions in the next utterance in inquiry dialogues is proposed. First, information of the next utterance, the utterance type, the main action and the discourse entities, can be grasped using a dialogue interpretation model. Secondly, focusing in particular on dialogue situations in context, a domain-dependent knowledge-base for literal usage of both noun phrases and verb phrases is developed. Finally, a strategy to make a set of linguistic expressions which are derived from semantic concepts consisting of appropriate expressions can be used to select the correct candidate from the speech recognition output. In this paper, some of the processes are particularly examined in which sets of polite expressions, vocatives, compound nominal phrases, verbal phrases, and intention expressions, which are common in telephone inquiry dialogue, are created.