The top-K sorting is a variant of sorting used heavily in applications such as database management systems. Recently, the use of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to accelerate sorting operation has attracted the interest of researchers. However, existing hardware top-K sorting algorithms are either resource-intensive or of low throughput. In this paper, we present a resource-efficient top-K sorting architecture that is composed of L cascading sorting units, and each sorting unit is composed of P sorting cells. K=PL largest elements are produced when a variable length input sequence is processed. This architecture can operate at a high frequency while consuming fewer resources. The experimental results show that our architecture achieved a maximum 1.2x throughput-to-resource improvement compared to previous studies.

A method to predict lightning by machine learning analysis of atmospheric electric fields is proposed for the first time. In this study, we calculated an anomaly score with long short-term memory (LSTM), a recurrent neural network analysis method, using electric field data recorded every second on the ground. The threshold value of the anomaly score was defined, and a lightning alarm at the observation point was issued or canceled. Using this method, it was confirmed that 88.9% of lightning occurred while alarming. These results suggest that a lightning prediction system with an electric field sensor and machine learning can be developed in the future.

Although end-to-end based speech recognition research for Mandarin-English code-switching has attracted increasing interests, it remains challenging due to data scarcity. Meta-learning approach is popular with low-resource modeling using high-resource data, but it does not make full use of low-resource code-switching data. Therefore we propose a two-fold cross-validation training framework combined with meta-learning approach. Experiments on the SEAME corpus demonstrate the effects of our method.

Laser Doppler Vibrometers (LDVs) enable the acquisition of remote speech signals by measuring small-scale vibrations around a target. They are now widely used in the fields of information acquisition and national security. However, in remote speech detection, the coherent measurement signal is subject to environmental noise, making detecting and reconstructing speech signals challenging. To improve the detection distance and speech quality, this paper proposes a highly accurate real-time speech measurement method that can reconstruct speech from noisy coherent signals. First, the I/Q demodulation and arctangent phase discrimination are used to extract the phase transformation caused by the acoustic vibration from coherent signals. Then, an innovative smoothness criterion and a novel phase difference-based dynamic bilateral compensation phase unwrapping algorithm are used to remove any ambiguity caused by the arctangent phase discrimination in the previous step. This important innovation results in the highly accurate detection of phase jumps. After this, a further innovation is used to enhance the reconstructed speech by applying an improved waveform-based linear prediction coding method, together with adaptive spectral subtraction. This removes any impulsive or background noise. The accuracy and performance of the proposed method were validated by conducting extensive simulations and comparisons with existing techniques. The results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the measurement of speech and the quality of reconstructed speech signals. The viability of the method was further assessed by undertaking a physical experiment, where LDV equipment was used to measure speech at a distance of 310m in an outdoor environment. The intelligibility rate for the reconstructed speech exceeded 95%, confirming the effectiveness and superiority of the method for long-distance laser speech measurement.

Deep unfolding is a promising deep-learning technique, whose network architecture is based on expanding the recursive structure of existing iterative algorithms. Although deep unfolding realizes convergence acceleration, its theoretical aspects have not been revealed yet. This study details the theoretical analysis of the convergence acceleration in deep-unfolded gradient descent (DUGD) whose trainable parameters are step sizes. We propose a plausible interpretation of the learned step-size parameters in DUGD by introducing the principle of Chebyshev steps derived from Chebyshev polynomials. The use of Chebyshev steps in gradient descent (GD) enables us to bound the spectral radius of a matrix governing the convergence speed of GD, leading to a tight upper bound on the convergence rate. Numerical results show that Chebyshev steps numerically explain the learned step-size parameters in DUGD well.

In this paper, an experimental method is proposed for extracting the primary and secondary parameters of transmission lines with frequency dispersion. So far, there is no report of these methods being applied to transmission lines with frequency dispersion. This paper provides an experimental evaluation means of transmission lines with frequency dispersion and clarifies the issues when applying the proposed method. In the proposed experimental method, unnecessary components such as connectors are removed by using a simple de-embedding method. The frequency response of the primary and secondary parameters extracted by using the method reproduced all dispersion characteristics of a transmission line with frequency dispersion successfully. It is demonstrated that an accurate RLGC equivalent-circuit model is obtained experimentally, which can be used to quantitatively evaluate the frequency/time responses of shielded-FPC with frequency dispersion and to validate RLGC equivalent-circuit models extracted by using electromagnetic field analysis.

A unified construction for yielding optimal and balanced quaternary sequences from ideal/optimal balanced binary sequences was proposed by Zeng et al. In this paper, the linear complexity over finite field 𝔽2, 𝔽4 and Galois ring ℤ4 of the quaternary sequences are discussed, respectively. The exact values of linear complexity of sequences obtained by Legendre sequence pair, twin-prime sequence pair and Hall's sextic sequence pair are derived.

This paper investigates the charging control strategy design problem of a large-scale plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) group, where each PEV aims to find an optimal charging strategy to minimize its own cost function. It should be noted that the collective behavior of the group is coupled in the individual cost function, which complicates the design of decentralized charging strategies. To obtain the decentralized charging strategy, a mean-field game (MFG) formulation is proposed where a penalty on collective consensus is embedded and a class of mean-field coupled time-varying stochastic systems is targeted for solving the MFG which involves the charging model of PEVs as a special case. Then, an augmented system with dimension extension and the policy iteration algorithm are proposed to solve the mean-field game problem for the class of mean-field coupled time-varying stochastic systems. Moreover, analysis of the convergence of proposed approach has been studied. Last, simulation is conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed MFG-based charging control strategy and shows that the charging control strategy can achieve desired mean-field state and impact to the power grid can be buffered.

Side-channel analysis is one of the most investigated hardware Trojan detection approaches. However, nearly all the side-channel analysis approaches require golden chips for reference, which are hard to obtain actually. Besides, majority of existing Trojan detection algorithms focus on the data similarity and ignore the Trojan misclassification during the detection. In this paper, we propose a cost-sensitive golden chip-free hardware Trojan detection framework, which aims to minimize the probability of Trojan misclassification during the detection. The post-layout simulation data of voltage variations at different process corners is utilized as a golden reference. Further, a classification algorithm based on the combination of principal component analysis and Naïve bayes is exploited to identify the existence of hardware Trojan with a minimum misclassification risk. Experimental results on ASIC demonstrate that the proposed approach improves the detection accuracy ratio compared with the three detection algorithms and distinguishes the Trojan with only 0.27% area occupies even under ±15% process variations.

Magnetic fields are often utilized for position sensing of mobile devices. In typical sensing systems, multiple sensors are used to detect magnetic fields generated by target devices. To determine the positions of the devices, magnetic-field data detected by the sensors must be converted to device-position data. The data conversion is not trivial because it is a nonlinear inverse problem. In this study, we propose a machine-learning approach suitable for data conversion required in the magnetic-field-based position sensing of target devices. In our approach, two different sets of training data are used. One of the training datasets is composed of raw data of magnetic fields to be detected by sensors. The other set is composed of logarithmically represented data of the fields. We can obtain two different predictor functions by learning with these training datasets. Results show that the prediction accuracy of the target position improves when the two different predictor functions are used. Based on our simulation, the error of the target position estimated with the predictor functions is within 10cm in a 2m × 2m × 2m cubic space for 87% of all the cases of the target device states. The computational time required for predicting the positions of the target device is 4ms. As the prediction method is accurate and rapid, it can be utilized for the real-time tracking of moving objects and people.

In this paper, we present a scheme to compute either AB or AB2 multiplications over GF(2m) and propose a bit-parallel systolic architecture based on the proposed algorithm. The AB multiplication algorithm is derived in the same form as the formula of AB2 multiplication algorithm, and an architecture that can perform AB multiplication by adding very little extra hardware to AB2 multiplier is designed. Therefore, the proposed architecture can be effectively applied to hardware constrained applications that cannot deploy AB2 multiplier and AB multiplier separately.

Millimeter wave synthetic aperture interferometric radiometers (SAIR) are very powerful instruments, which can effectively realize high-precision imaging detection. However due to the existence of interference factor and complex near-field error, the imaging effect of near-field SAIR is usually not ideal. To achieve better imaging results, a new fully connected imaging network (FCIN) is proposed for near-field SAIR. In FCIN, the fully connected network is first used to reconstruct the image domain directly from the visibility function, and then the residual dense network is used for image denoising and enhancement. The simulation results show that the proposed FCIN method has high imaging accuracy and shorten imaging time.

This paper proposes a novel maximum Doppler frequency detection technique for user moving velocity estimation. The maximum Doppler frequency is estimated in the proposed detection technique by making use of the fact that user moving velocity is not distributed continuously. The fluctuation of the channel state information during a packet is applied for the proposed detection, in which likelihood estimation is performed by comparing the fluctuation with the thresholds. The thresholds are theoretically derived on the assumption that the fluctuation is distributed with an exponential function. An approximated detection technique is proposed to simplify the theoretical threshold derivation. The performance of the proposed detection is evaluated by computer simulation. The proposed detection accomplishes better detection performance as the fluctuation values are summed over more packets. The proposed detection achieves about 90% correct detection performance in a fading channel with the Eb/N0 = 35dB, when the fluctuation values are summed over only three packets. Furthermore, the approximated detection also achieves the same detection performance.

To achieve smooth beam injection in operation of synchrotron radiation facilities, pulsed multipole magnet beam injectors are developed. It is found that the developed beam injector causes serious disturbance in the circulating storage beam in the Aichi synchrotron radiation center, and that such the unexpected disturbance of the storage beam may be caused by eddy current induced on thin titanium coating inside a beam duct. In this work, the induced eddy current on the titanium layer is evaluated quantitatively by numerical simulations and improvement for the developed beam injector is discussed based on the numerical simulation.

The spectral envelope parameter is a significant speech parameter in the vocoder's quality. Recently, the Vector Quantized Variational AutoEncoder (VQ-VAE) is a state-of-the-art end-to-end quantization method based on the deep learning model. This paper proposed a new technique for improving the embedding space learning of VQ-VAE with the Generative Adversarial Network for quantizing the spectral envelope parameter, called VQ-VAE-EMGAN. In experiments, we designed the quantizer for the spectral envelope parameters of the WORLD vocoder extracted from the 16kHz speech waveform. As the results shown, the proposed technique reduced the Log Spectral Distortion (LSD) around 0.5dB and increased the PESQ by around 0.17 on average for four target bit operations compared to the conventional VQ-VAE.

Near-field beamforming has played an important role in many scenarios such as radar imaging and acoustic detection. In this paper, the near-field beamforming is implemented in the time modulated array with the harmonic. The beam pattern with a low sidelobe level in precise position is achieved by controlling the switching sequence in time modulated cross array. Numerical results verify the correctness of the proposed method.

The effect of provision of “Neither-Good-Nor-Bad” (NGNB) information on the perceived trustworthiness of agents has been investigated in previous studies. The experimental results have revealed several conditions under which the provision of NGNB information works effectively to make users perceive greater trust of agents. However, the experiments in question were carried out in a situation in which a user is able to choose, with the agent's advice, one of a limited number of options. In practical problems, we are often at a loss as to which to choose because there are too many possible options and it is not easy to narrow them down. Furthermore, in the above-mentioned previous studies, it was easy to predict the size of profits that a user would obtain because its pattern was also limited. This prompted us, in this paper, to investigate the effect of provision of NGNB information on the users' trust of agents under conditions where it appears to the users that numerous options are available. Our experimental results reveal that an agent that reliably provides NGNB information tends to gain greater user trust in a situation where it appears to the users that there are numerous options and their consequences, and it is not easy to predict the size of profits. However, in contradiction to the previous study, the results in this paper also reveal that stable provision of NGNB information in the context of numerous options is less effective in a situation where it is harder to obtain larger profits.

In this study, Bayesian image denoising, in which the prior distribution is assumed to be a Gaussian Markov random field (GMRF), is considered. Recently, an effective algorithm for Bayesian image denoising with a standard GMRF prior has been proposed, which can help implement the overall procedure and optimize its parameters in O(n)-time, where n is the size of the image. A new GMRF-type prior, referred to as a hierarchical GMRF (HGMRF) prior, is proposed, which is obtained by applying a hierarchical Bayesian approach to the standard GMRF prior; in addition, an effective denoising algorithm based on the HGMRF prior is proposed. The proposed HGMRF method can help implement the overall procedure and optimize its parameters in O(n)-time, as well as the previous GMRF method. The restoration quality of the proposed method is found to be significantly higher than that of the previous GMRF method as well as that of a non-local means filter in several cases. Furthermore, numerical evidence implies that the proposed HGMRF prior is more suitable for the image prior than the standard GMRF prior.

In this paper, we introduce a path embedding problem inspired by the well-known hydrophobic-polar (HP) model of protein folding. A graph is said bicolored if each vertex is assigned a label in the set {red, blue}. For a given bicolored path P and a given bicolored graph G, our problem asks whether we can embed P into G in such a way as to match the colors of the vertices. In our model, G represents a protein's “blueprint,” and P is an amino acid sequence that has to be folded to form (part of) G. We first show that the bicolored path embedding problem is NP-complete even if G is a rectangular grid (a typical scenario in protein folding models) and P and G have the same number of vertices. By contrast, we prove that the problem becomes tractable if the height of the rectangular grid G is constant, even if the length of P is independent of G. Our proof is constructive: we give a polynomial-time algorithm that computes an embedding (or reports that no embedding exists), which implies that the problem is in XP when parameterized according to the height of G. Additionally, we show that the problem of embedding P into a rectangular grid G in such a way as to maximize the number of red-red contacts is NP-hard. (This problem is directly inspired by the HP model of protein folding; it was previously known to be NP-hard if G is not given, and P can be embedded in any way on a grid.) Finally, we show that, given a bicolored graph G, the problem of constructing a path P that embeds in G maximizing red-red contacts is Poly-APX-hard.

In this work, we consider a remote estimation system where a remote controller estimates the status of heterogeneous sensing devices with the information delivered over wireless channels. Status of heterogeneous devices changes at different speeds. With limited wireless resources, estimating as accurately as possible requires careful design of status update schemes. Status update schemes can be divided into two classes: centralized and decentralized. In centralized schemes, a central scheduler coordinates devices to avoid potential collisions. However, in decentralized schemes where each device updates on its own, update decisions can be made by using the current status which is unavailable in centralized schemes. The relation between these two schemes under the heterogeneous devices case is unclear, and thus we study these two schemes in terms of the mean square error (MSE) of the estimation. For centralized schemes, since the scheduler does not have the current status of each device, we study policies where the scheduling decisions are based on age of information (AoI), which measures the staleness of the status information held in the controller. The optimal scheduling policy is provided, along with the corresponding MSE. For decentralized schemes, we consider deviation-based policies with which only devices with estimation deviations larger than prescribed thresholds may update, and the others stay idle. We derive an approximation of the minimum MSE under the deviation-based policies and show that it is e/3 of the minimum MSE under the AoI-based policies. Simulation results further show that the actual minimum MSEs of these two policies are even closer than that shown by the approximation, which indicates that the cost of collision in the deviation-based policy cancels out the gain from exploiting status deviations.