Since electromagnetic (EM) noise resulting from an arc discharge disturbs other electric devices, parameters on electromagnetic compatibility, as well as lifetime and reliability, are important properties for electrical contacts. To clarify the characteristics and the mechanism of the generation of the EM noise, the arc column and voltage fluctuations generated by slowly breaking contacts with external direct current (DC) magnetic field, up to 20,mT, was investigated experimentally using Ag$_{90.7{ m wt%}}$SnO$_{2,9.3{ m wt}%}$ material. Firstly the motion of the arc column is measured by high-speed camera. Secondary, the distribution of the motion of the arc and contact voltage are discussed. It was revealed that the contact voltage fluctuation in the arc duration is related to the arc column motion.

Many fatal accidents involving safety-critical reactive systems have occurred in unexpected situations that were not considered during the design and test phases of development. To prevent such accidents, reactive systems should be designed to respond appropriately to any request from an environment at any time. Verifying this property during the specification phase reduces development reworking. This property of a specification is commonly known as realizability. Realizability checking for reactive system specifications involves complex and intricate analysis. The complexity of realizability problems is 2EXPTIME-complete. To detect typical simple deficiencies in specifications efficiently, we introduce the notion of bounded strong satisfiability (a necessary condition for realizability), and present a method for checking this property. Bounded strong satisfiability is the property that, for all input patterns represented by loop structures of a given size k, there is a response that satisfies a given specification. We report a checking method based on a satisfiability solver, and show that the complexity of the bounded strong satisfiability problem is co-NEXPTIME-complete. Moreover, we report experimental results showing that our method is more efficient than existing approaches.

This paper presents a novel acoustic modeling technique of large vocabulary automatic speech recognition for under-resourced languages by leveraging well-trained acoustic models of other languages (called source languages). The idea is to use source language acoustic model to score the acoustic features of the target language, and then map these scores to the posteriors of the target phones using a classifier. The target phone posteriors are then used for decoding in the usual way of hybrid acoustic modeling. The motivation of such a strategy is that human languages usually share similar phone sets and hence it may be easier to predict the target phone posteriors from the scores generated by source language acoustic models than to train from scratch an under-resourced language acoustic model. The proposed method is evaluated using on the Aurora-4 task with less than 1 hour of training data. Two types of source language acoustic models are considered, i.e. hybrid HMM/MLP and conventional HMM/GMM models. In addition, we also use triphone tied states in the mapping. Our experimental results show that by leveraging well trained Malay and Hungarian acoustic models, we achieved 9.0% word error rate (WER) given 55 minutes of English training data. This is close to the WER of 7.9% obtained by using the full 15 hours of training data and much better than the WER of 14.4% obtained by conventional acoustic modeling techniques with the same 55 minutes of training data.

Arc discharge at breaking electrical contact is considered as a main source of not only degradation of the electrical property but also an undesired electromagnetic (EM) noise. In order to clarify the effect of holder temperature on the bridge and arc-duration, opening-waveforms at slowly separating silver-tin dioxide contact with different holder temperature are measured and discussed experimentally in this paper. Firstly, as opening-waveforms, the contact voltage, the contact current and the movement of moving contact related to the gap length are measured simultaneously. Secondly, the relationship between temperature of the holder and duration of the arc was quantified experimentally. It was revealed that as the initial temperature of the holder becomes higher, arc-duration becomes slightly longer. More importantly, the holder temperature dependencies of percentage of each-phase (metallic and gaseous-phases) are different with different closed-current.

We consider a multi-hop control network where a wireless network is used for transmissions of input and output data between a plant and a computing system. We formulate a co-scheduling problem of sampling of the plant's outputs, execution of control tasks, and the routing of data transmissions in the network. Several constraints on control tasks and data transmission are described by logical formulae. By using a SAT solver, we obtain a scheduling satisfying the constraints. Through simulation, we investigate the relationship between the computation time in the SAT solver and the number of nodes in the network.

This paper describes a low-power VLSI chip for speaker-independent 60-kWord continuous speech recognition based on a context-dependent Hidden Markov Model (HMM). It features a compression-decoding scheme to reduce the external memory bandwidth for Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) computation and multi-path Viterbi transition units. We optimize the internal SRAM size using the max-approximation GMM calculation and adjusting the number of look-ahead frames. The test chip, fabricated in 40 nm CMOS technology, occupies 1.77 mm2.18 mm containing 2.52 M transistors for logic and 4.29 Mbit on-chip memory. The measured results show that our implementation achieves 34.2% required frequency reduction (83.3 MHz), 48.5% power consumption reduction (74.14 mW) for 60 k-Word real-time continuous speech recognition compared to the previous work while 30% of the area is saved with recognition accuracy of 90.9%. This chip can maximally process 2.4faster than real-time at 200 MHz and 1.1 V with power consumption of 168 mW. By increasing the beam width, better recognition accuracy (91.45%) can be achieved. In that case, the power consumption for real-time processing is increased to 97.4 mW and the max-performance is decreased to 2.08because of the increased computation workload.

We demonstrated the reduced surface roughness of poly (3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT):(6,6)-phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) thin films with different ratios fabricated by the electrospray deposition (ESD) method. Aggregated structures were observed at the lower voltage, and the uniformity became bad at the higher voltage. Anyway, the minimum root mean square (RMS) roughness was 1.46 nm by optimizing the applied voltage.

Flow mobility is an emerging technology to support flexible network selection for an application flow and to spread concentrated load to less-overloaded Internet access. Network-based flow mobility (FMO) does not require a massive amount of software logic and system resources on the mobile node. Under this approach, there are two kinds of modes available: network-initiated and user-initiated. Network-initiated FMO decides the best access network suited for a specific flow, but the decisions depend on the operator's policy. Therefore, it has limitations in supporting the user's preference and private network selection. In the user-initiated mode, users can hand off specific flow so that information of both the current user's preference and the conditions of private network are reflected. User-initiated flow mobility method has not been what should be specified and how it can be supported with the protocol sequence for real deployment. This paper extends Internet Exchange Key v2 (IKEv2) and an Attach request message to support user-initiated FMO when a flow moves between 3G and Wi-Fi access. Through performance analysis, we confirm that user-initiated FMO is superior to network-initiated FMO in terms of signaling overhead and handover latency costs.

In this paper, a hybrid parallel implementation of inverse matrix computation using SMW formula is proposed. By aggregating the memory bandwidth in the hybrid parallel implementation, the bottleneck due to the memory bandwidth limitation in the authors previous multicore implementation has been dissolved. More than 8 times of speed up is also achieved with dual-core 8-nodes implementation which leads more than 20 simulation steps per second, or near real-time performance.

Arc discharge generated by breaking electrical contact is considered as a main source of not only degradation of the electrical property but also an undesired electromagnetic (EM) noise. In order to clarify the effect of heated temperature on the bridge, arc-duration and the fluctuation of voltage, opening-waveforms at slowly separating silver-tin dioxide contact with holder heating are measured and discussed experimentally in this paper. Firstly, opening-waveforms are measured. Secondly, voltage fluctuation of the each arc-phase is discussed to extract the effect of the heated holder. The relationship between temperature of the heated holder and duration and fluctuation of the arc was investigated experimentally. It was revealed that as the initial temperature of the heated holder becomes higher, arc-duration becomes slightly longer. In addition, voltage fluctuation at the gaseous-phase decreases when the holder is heated. Consequently, the heated holder can suppress the voltage fluctuation even if its duration becomes slightly longer.

We propose a novel modular network called the Self-Evolving Modular Network (SEEM). The SEEM has a modular network architecture with a graph structure and these following advantages: (1) new modules are added incrementally to allow the network to adapt in a self-organizing manner, and (2) graph's paths are formed based on the relationships between the models represented by modules. The SEEM is expected to be applicable to evolving functions of an autonomous robot in a self-organizing manner through interaction with the robot's environment and categorizing large-scale information. This paper presents the architecture and an algorithm for the SEEM. Moreover, performance characteristic and effectiveness of the network are shown by simulations using cubic functions and a set of 3D-objects.

This paper presents our recent work in regard to building Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) systems for the Thai, Indonesian, and Chinese languages. For Thai, since there is no word boundary in the written form, we have proposed a new method for automatically creating word-like units from a text corpus, and applied topic and speaking style adaptation to the language model to recognize spoken-style utterances. For Indonesian, we have applied proper noun-specific adaptation to acoustic modeling, and rule-based English-to-Indonesian phoneme mapping to solve the problem of large variation in proper noun and English word pronunciation in a spoken-query information retrieval system. In spoken Chinese, long organization names are frequently abbreviated, and abbreviated utterances cannot be recognized if the abbreviations are not included in the dictionary. We have proposed a new method for automatically generating Chinese abbreviations, and by expanding the vocabulary using the generated abbreviations, we have significantly improved the performance of spoken query-based search.

This paper considers the discrete model of the cart-pendulum system modeled by discrete mechanics, which is known as a good discretizing method for mechanical systems and has not been really applied to control theory. We first sum up basic concepts on discrete mechanics and discuss the explicitness of the linear approximation of the discrete Euler-Lagrange Equations. Next, the discrete cart-pendulum system is derived and analyzed from the viewpoint of solvability of implicit nonlinear control systems. We then show a control algorithm to stabilize the discrete cart-pendulum based on the discrete-time optimal regulator theory. Finally, some simulations are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

This paper presents the iterative progressive numerical methods (IPNMs) based on the induced dimension reduction (IDR) theorem. The IDR theorem is mainly utilized for the development of new nonstationary linear iterative solvers. On the other hand, the use of the IDR theorem enables to revise the classical linear iterative solvers like the Jacobi, the Gauss-Seidel (GS), the relaxed Jacobi, the successive overrelaxation (SOR), and the symmetric SOR (SSOR) methods. The new IPNMs are based on the revised solvers because the original one is similar to the Jacobi method. In the new IPNMs, namely the IDR-based IPNMs, we repeatedly solve linear systems of equations by using a nonstationary linear iterative solver. An initial guess and a stopping criterion are discussed in order to realize a fast computation. We treat electromagnetic wave scattering from 27 perfectly electric conducting spheres and reports comparatively the performance of the IDR-based IPNMs. However, the IDR-based SOR- and the IDR-based SSOR-type IPNMs are not subject to the above numerical test in this paper because of the problem with an optimal relaxation parameter. The performance evaluation reveals that the IDR-based IPNMs are better than the conventional ones in terms of the net computation time and the application range for the distance between objects. The IDR-based GS-type IPNM is the best among the conventional and the IDR-based IPNMs and converges 5 times faster than a standard computation by way of the boundary element method.

Error analysis of the multilevel fast multipole algorithm is studied for electromagnetic scattering problems. We propose novel error prediction and control methods and verify that the computational error for scattering problems with over one million unknowns can be precisely controlled under desired digits of accuracy. Optimum selection of truncation numbers to minimize computational error also will be discussed.

We propose a committee-based method of active learning for large vocabulary continuous speech recognition. Multiple recognizers are trained in this approach, and the recognition results obtained from these are used for selecting utterances. Those utterances whose recognition results differ the most among recognizers are selected and transcribed. Progressive alignment and voting entropy are used to measure the degree of disagreement among recognizers on the recognition result. Our method was evaluated by using 191-hour speech data in the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese. It proved to be significantly better than random selection. It only required 63 h of data to achieve a word accuracy of 74%, while standard training (i.e., random selection) required 103 h of data. It also proved to be significantly better than conventional uncertainty sampling using word posterior probabilities.

Using a self-developed ASTM test system of contact material electrical properties under low voltage (LV), small-capacity, the current-frequency variable and a photoelectric analytical balance, the electric performance comparison experiments and material weighing of silver-based electrical contact materials, such as silver/tungsten and silver/cadmium oxide contact materials, are completed under LV, pure resistive load and small current at 400 Hz/50 Hz. The surface profiles and constituents of silver/tungsten contact material were observed and analyzed by SEM and EDAX. Researches indicate that the form of the contact material arc burnout at 400 Hz is stasis, not an eddy flow style at 50 Hz; meanwhile, the area of the contact burnout at 400 Hz is less than that of 50 Hz, and the local ablation on the surface layer at 400 Hz is more serious. Comparing the capacities of the silver-based contact materials with different second element such as CAgW50, CAgNi10, CAgC4 and CAgCdO15 at 400 Hz, no matter what the performances of arc erosion resistance or welding resistance, it can be found that the capacities of the silver/tungsten material is the best.

This letter is devoted to derivation of a transformation law which converts a class of nonlinear affine control systems with n-states and 2-iputs into simpler systems with chained structure. First, we give a problem formulation that we consider throughout this letter. We next introduce a transformation law and gives its mathematical certification. Then, we apply the transformation method to an example and consider control design based on chained structure for the example in order to confirm the effectiveness of our approach.

This paper presents various types of iterative progressive numerical methods (IPNMs) for the computation of electromagnetic (EM) wave scattering from many objects and reports comparatively the performance of these methods. The original IPNM is similar to the Jacobi method which is one of the classical linear iterative solvers. Then the modified IPNMs are based on other classical solvers like the Gauss-Seidel (GS), the relaxed Jacobi, the successive overrelaxation (SOR), and the symmetric SOR (SSOR) methods. In the original and modified IPNMs, we repeatedly solve linear systems of equations by using a nonstationary iterative solver. An initial guess and a stopping criterion are discussed in order to realize a fast computation. We treat EM wave scattering from 27 perfectly electric conducting (PEC) spheres and evaluate the performance of the IPNMs. However, the SOR- and SSOR-type IPNMs are not subject to the above numerical test in this paper because an optimal relaxation parameter is not possible to determine in advance. The evaluation reveals that the IPNMs converge much faster than a standard BEM computation. The relaxed Jacobi-type IPNM is better than the other types in terms of the net computation time and the application range for the distance between objects.

Routing is still a challenging issue for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), in particular for WSNs with a non-uniform deployment of nodes. This paper introduces a Node Aggregation Degree-aware Random Routing (NADRR) algorithm for non-uniform WSNs with the help of two new concepts, namely the Local Vertical Aggregation Degree (LVAD) and Local Horizontal Aggregation Degree (LHAD). Our basic idea is to first apply the LVAD and LHAD to determine one size-proper forwarding region (rather than a fixed-size one as in uniform node deployment case) for each node participating in routing, then select the next hop node from the size-proper forwarding region in a probabilistic way, considering both the residual energy and distribution of nodes. In this way, a good adaptability to the non-uniform deployment of nodes can be guaranteed by the new routing algorithm. Extensive simulation results show that in comparison with other classical geographic position based routing algorithms, such as GPSR, TPGF and CR, the proposed NADRR algorithm can result in lower node energy consumption, better balance of node energy consumption, higher routing success rate and longer network lifetime.