A novel pitch-synchronous auditory-based feature extraction method for robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) is proposed. A pitch-synchronous zero-crossing peak-amplitude (PS-ZCPA)-based feature extraction method was proposed previously and it showed improved performances except when modulation enhancement was integrated with Wiener filter (WF)-based noise reduction and auditory masking. However, since zero-crossing is not an auditory event, we propose a new pitch-synchronous peak-amplitude (PS-PA)-based method to render the feature extractor of ASR more auditory-like. We also examine the effects of WF-based noise reduction, modulation enhancement, and auditory masking in the proposed PS-PA method using the Aurora-2J database. The experimental results show superiority of the proposed method over the PS-ZCPA and other conventional methods. Furthermore, the problem due to the reconstruction of zero-crossings from a modulated envelope is eliminated. The experimental results also show the superiority of PS over PA in terms of the robustness of ASR, though PS and PA lead to significant improvement when applied together.

Collusion-secure codes are used for digital fingerprinting and for traitor tracing. In both cases, the goal is to prevent unauthorized copying of copyrighted material, by tracing at least one guilty user when illegal copies appear. The most well-known collusion-secure code is due to Boneh and Shaw (1995/98). In this paper we improve the decoding algorithm by using soft output from the inner decoder, and we show that this permits using significantly shorter codewords.

The location information of ubiquitous objects is one of the key issues for context-aware systems. Therefore, several positioning systems to obtain precise location information have been researched. However, they have scalability and flexibility problems because they need completely configured space with a large number of sensors. To avoid the problems, we proposed a self-organizing location estimation method that uses ad hoc networks and Self-Organizing Maps and needs no prepared space with a large number of sensors. But, as in other similar precise localization methods, the proposed method needs advanced distance measurements unavailable to conventional wireless communication systems. In this paper, the self-organizing location estimation method's modification for distance measurement that uses received signal strength available to conventional wireless communication systems but which fluctuates uncertainly, is described and location estimation accuracy with the modified method is shown.

Distributed denial-of-service attacks on public servers have recently become more serious. More are SYN Flood attacks, since the malicious attackers can easily exploit the TCP specification to generate traffic making public servers unavailable. To assure that network services will not be interrupted, we need faster and more accurate defense mechanisms against malicious traffic, especially SYN Floods. One of the problems in detecting SYN Flood traffic is that server nodes or firewalls cannot distinguish the SYN packets of normal TCP connections from those of SYN Flood attack. Moreover, since the rate of normal network traffic may vary, we cannot use an explicit threshold of SYN arrival rates to detect SYN Flood traffic. In this paper we introduce a mechanism for detecting SYN Flood traffic more accurately by taking into consideration the time variation of arrival traffic. We first investigate the statistics of the arrival rates of both normal TCP SYN packets and SYN Flood attack packets. We then describe our new detection mechanism based on the statistics of SYN arrival rates. Our analytical results show that the arrival rate of normal TCP SYN packets can be modeled by a normal distribution and that our proposed mechanism can detect SYN Flood traffic quickly and accurately regardless of time variance of the traffic.

The proposed zero-current switching switched-capacitor (ZCS SC) DC-DC converter is an innovative bi-directional power flow control conversion scheme. A zero-current switching switched-capacitor step-up/step-down bi-directional converter is presented that can improve the current stress problem during bi-directional power flow control processing. It can provide a high voltage conversion ratio of n/ (n-mode/-mode) using four power MOSFET main switches, a set of switched-capacitors and a small resonant inductor. Simulation and experimental results are carried out to verify the concept and performance of the proposed quadruple-mode/quarter-mode bi-directional DC-DC converter.

This paper studies a chaotic spiking oscillator consisting of two capacitors, two voltage-controlled current sources of signum shape and one impulsive switch. The vector field of circuit equation is piecewise constant and embedded return map is piecewise linear. Using the map parameter condition for chaos generation is given. Using a simple test circuit typical phenomena can be confirmed experimentally.

DC motors are indispensable to improve the automotive functions. Recently, 70-100 motors are installed on luxury cars and this number is increasing year by year. With the recent demand for improved fuel economy and better equipment layout, the improvement of the motor's efficiency and the minimization of the motor size are the key to enhancing the competitive edge of the products. Adopting the high-density coil is an effective method for that, but it is accompanied by the commutation inductance rise which causes the commutation arc increase. The increase of commutation arc decreases motor life, because it causes the rise of brush/commutator wear. This report describes an arc-reducing effect obtained when capacitors are built into a commutation circuit for the purpose of reducing arcing under high commutation inductance conditions. The results of an evaluation using a equivalent commutation circuit and carbon brush/carbon flat-commutator showed that although a commutation circuit with built-in capacitor generated the same arc energy as a commutation circuit without a capacitor above a certain value of residual current, it displayed an excellent arc-reducing effect below that value of residual current.

Diseases in the gastro-intestinal track are becoming more prevalent. In order to diagnose a patient, the various signals of the digestive organ, such as temperature, pH, and pressure, can offer helpful information. The variation of a pressure signal of the gastro-intestinal track can offer information about digestive troubles or provide clues about diseases. This paper presents a wireless system for the pressure monitoring system, which includes a swallow-type pressure capsule and the external receiving system. A transmitter, a transmitting antenna (Helix), a receiver, and a receiving antenna (Loop) were designed and fabricated in consideration of the MPE, power consumption, system size, signal to noise ratio and modulation method. The wireless system designed and implemented for the pressure monitoring system was verified by in-vivo experiments. As a result, we found each organ has its own characteristic pressure fluctuation.

A reduced-sample-rate (RSR) sigma-delta-pipeline (SDP) analog-to-digital converter architecture suitable for high-resolution and high-speed applications with low oversampling ratios (OSR) is presented. The proposed architecture employs a class of high-order noise transfer function (NTF) with a novel pole-zero locations. A design methodology is developed to reach the optimum NTF. The optimum NTF determines the location of the non-zero poles improving the stability of the loop and implementing the reduced-sample-rate structure, simultaneously. Unity gain signal transfer function to mitigate the analog circuit imperfections, simplified analog implementation with reduced number of operational transconductance amplifiers (OTAs), and novel, aggressive yet stable NTF with high out of band gain to achieve larger peak signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are the main features of the proposed NTF and ADC architecture. To verify the usefulness of the proposed architecture, NTF, and design methodology, two different cases are investigated. Simulation results show that with a 4th-order modulator, designed making use of the proposed approach, the maximum SNDR of 115 dB and 124.1 dB can be achieved with only OSR of 8, and 16 respectively.

Sleep transistors such as MTCMOS and SCCMOS drastically reduce leakage current, but their ON resistances cause significant performance degradation. Larger sleep transistors reduce their ON resistances, but increase leakage current in a sleep mode. Decoupling capacitors beside sleep transistors reduce leakage current. Experimental results show that PMOS SCCMOS with a 4 pF decoupling capacitor reduces leakage current by 1/673 on a 64 bit adder in a 90 nm process.

A compact on-chip signal monitor circuit uses voltage mode sensing by a source follower circuit with small input device geometry, followed by a current-mode sample and a hold circuit that is connected to a shared current output bus. A prototype signal monitor circuit demonstrated a 1.1-GHz effective bandwidth for 1.0-V full-swing digital signals in a 90-nm CMOS technology, where the monitor used 2.5-V I/O CMOS transistors and occupied a 30 µm120 µm silicon area. We also showed that such signal monitor circuits can be tailored to sense of power-supply, ground, as well as full-swing logic signal wirings, and form an array with a single current output. Therefore, an on-chip multi-channel signal monitor enables multiple-points as well as multiple-voltage domain waveform acquisition for the purpose of the in-depth study of digital signal integrity.

In this paper, the pressure monitoring telemetry system has been designed and implemented for an accurate pressure measure-ment inside the gastrointestinal tract with minimizing pain and inconvenience. The system is composed of a miniaturized pres-sure measurement capsule and an external receiver. The per-formance of the telemetry capsule for monitoring pressure in the gastrointestinal tract is demonstrated by the results of animal in-vivo experiments.

Blood pressure is one of the most important indicators of human health condition. A patient with hypertension in long term tends to have various kinds of vessel pathological changes such as coronary heart disease, apoplexy, and nephropathy. Consequently, the blood pressure measurement is important in daily health care for hypertension patients. Traditionally, the design and implementation of blood pressure monitor mostly focuses on the accuracy of pressure measurement and does not deal with the requirement of hypertension health care services with two-way communication via instant messages between the patient and the medical center. In this paper, a mobile-care system integrated with Bluetooth blood pressure and pulse monitor, and cellular phone is designed and implemented to transmit the physiological parameters of the patient in real time via wireless networks. The health care provider can monitor the blood pressure, body temperature, and heart rate of the patient and provide services by intelligent health care systems. The intelligent system constantly manages the health care data and periodically reports the status of the patient to the patient's family members. By the above care mechanism, the patients with hypertension can easily obtain long-term and constant monitoring of the physiological parameters and thus better health care services. A questionnaire survey has been conducted among medical personnel in Taipei municipal Wang-Fang hospital to collect their opinions of using our proposed and implemented blood pressure monitor with Bluetooth transmission function. An average of 95% of the medical personnel agree that long-term monitoring of the patients' physiological information such as blood pressure can be helpful to reduce medical cost, to provide useful reference data, and to provide long-distance health care. This thus shows strong support of the usefulness of our proposed device. Our proposed and implemented device has also been submitted to US FDA for medical device approval.

In iterative software development methodology, a version control system is used in order to record and manage modification histories of products such as source codes and models described in diagrams. However, conventional version control systems cannot manage the models as a logical unit because the systems mainly handle source codes. In this paper, we propose a version control technique for handling diagrammatical models as logical units. Then we illustrate the feasibility of our approach with the implementation of version control functions of a meta-CASE tool that is able to generate a modeling tool in order to deal with various diagrams.

An RF adaptive array antenna (RF-AAA) configured with variable capacitors is proposed. This antenna system can control the power combining ratio and phase value of received signals. In this paper, we focus on the diversity effects of RF-AAA. First, we show the design methodology of the combiner circuit to realize the effective combining. Second, the perturbation method and the steepest gradient method are compared for the optimization algorithms to provide fast convergence and suboptimum solutions among the variable circuit constants. Finally, in simulation, we show the RF-AAA can achieve diversity antenna gains of 7.7 dB, 10.9 dB and 12.6 dB for 2-branch, 3-branch and 4-branch configuration, respectively, which have higher performance than the selection combining.

We propose a tool to manage several sorts of relationships among RDF (Resource Description Framework) and RDFS (RDF Schema). Our tool consists of three main functions: graphical editing of RDF descriptions, graphical editing of RDFS descriptions, and meta-model management facilities. In this paper, we focus on the meta-model management, a key concept which is defined as the appropriate management of the correspondence between a model and its meta-model: especially, the class and property in the meta-model, and the type of RDF resource and property in the model. The above facilities are implemented based on the plug-in system. We provide basic plug-in modules for checking the consistency of RDFS classes and properties. The prototyping tool, called MR3 (Meta-Model Management based on RDFs Revision Reflection), is implemented by Java language. Through an experiment using MR3, we show how MR3 contributes to the Semantic Web paradigm from the standpoint of RDFs description management.

A pitch-synchronous (PS) auditory feature extraction method based on ZCPA (Zero-Crossings Peak-Amplitudes) was proposed previously and showed more robustness over a conventional ZCPA and MFCC based features. In this paper, firstly, a non-linear adaptive threshold adjustment procedure is introduced into the PS-ZCPA method to get optimal results in noisy conditions with different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Next, auditory masking, a well-known auditory perception, and modulation enhancement that simulates a strong relationship between modulation spectrums and intelligibility of speech are embedded into the PS-ZCPA method. Finally, a Wiener filter based noise reduction procedure is integrated into the method to make it more noise-robust, and the performance is evaluated against ETSI ES202 (WI008), which is a standard front-end for distributed speech recognition. All the experiments were carried out on Aurora-2J database. The experimental results demonstrated improved performance of the PS-ZCPA method by embedding auditory masking into it, and a slightly improved performance by using modulation enhancement. The PS-ZCPA method with Wiener filter based noise reduction also showed better performance than ETSI ES202 (WI008).

In ubiquitous environment that users access resource anytime and anywhere, access control model should consider user's location information. The proposed uT-RBAC includes the location information for user's least privilege. It also supports time related information, which enables the access control model to accommodate various ubiquitous environments. The proposed uT-RBAC can be dynamically applied to various ubiquitous computing envrionment.

As digital television transmission is becoming ubiquitous, a method that can remotely monitor the quality of the final and intermediate pictures is urgently needed. In particular, the case where standards conversion is included in the transmission chain is a serious issue as the input and output cannot simply be compared. This letter proposes a novel method to solve this issue. The combination of skipping fields/pixels and the previously proposed SSSWHT-RR method, using the information of correlation coefficients and variance of the picture, achieves accurate detection of picture failure.

Traceability codes are used in schemes that prevent illegal redistribution of digital content. In this Letter, we use Chinese Reminder Theorem codes to construct traceability codes. Both the code parameters and the traitor identification process take into account the non-uniformity of the alphabet of Chinese Reminder Theorem codes. Moreover it is shown that the identification process can be done in polynomial time using list decoding techniques.