In this report, we propose a tracking algorithm of speaker direction using microphones located at vertices of an equilateral triangle. The method realizes tracking by minimizing a performance index that consists of the cross spectra at three different microphone pairs in the triangular array. We adopt the steepest descent method to minimize it, and for guaranteeing global convergence to the correct direction with high accuracy, we alter the performance index during the adaptation depending on the convergence state. Through some computer simulation and experiments in a real acoustic environment, we show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Holey Fiber (HF) technology has progressed rapidly in recent years and has resulted in the development of a wide range of optical fibers with unique and highly useful optical properties including endlessly single-mode guidance, and high optical nonlinearity. In this paper the state-of-the-art HF technology for all-optical signal processing devices is reviewed from a perspective of possible application for telecommunications.

This paper describes the special demands of conversational speech in the context of corpus-based speech synthesis. The author proposed the CHATR system of prosody-based unit-selection for concatenative waveform synthesis seven years ago, and now extends this work to incorporate the results of an analysis of five-years of recordings of spontaneous conversational speeech in a wide range of actual daily-life situations. The paper proposes that the expresion of affect (often translated as 'kansei' in Japanese) is the main factor differentiating laboratory speech from real-world conversational speech, and presents a framework for the specification of affect through differences in speaking style and voice quality. Having an enormous corpus of speech samples available for concatenation allows the selection of complete phrase-sized utterance segments, and changes the focus of unit selection from segmental or phonetic continuity to one of prosodic and discoursal appropriateness instead. Samples of the resulting large-corpus-based synthesis can be heard at http://feast.his.atr.jp/AESOP.

We briefly survey recent developments in the thin film synthesis and junction fabrication of MgB2 toward superconducting electronics. The most serious problem in the thin film synthesis of MgB2 is the high vapor pressure required for phase stability. This problem makes in-situ film growth difficult. However, there has been substantial progress in thin film technology for MgB2 in the past three years. The low-temperature thin-film process in a UHV chamber can produce high-quality MgB2 films with Tc 35 K. Furthermore, technology to produce single-crystal epitaxial MgB2 films has recently been developed by using hybrid physical-chemical vapor deposition. With regard to Josephson junctions, various types of junctions have been fabricated, all of which indicate that MgB2 has potential for superconducting devices that operate at 20-30 K, the temperature reached by current commercial cryocoolers.

Three-dimensional (3D) wafer stacked implementation (WSI) has been proposed as a promising technology for massively parallel computers. A hierarchical 3D-torus (H3DT) network, which is a 3D-torus network of multiple basic modules in which the basic modules are 3D-mesh networks, has been proposed for efficient 3D-WSI. However, the restricted use of physical links between basic modules in the higher level networks reduces the dynamic communication performance of this network. A torus network has better dynamic communication performance than a mesh network. Therefore, we have modified the H3DT network by replacing the 3D-mesh modules by 3D-tori, calling it a Modified H3DT (MH3DT) network. This paper addresses the architectural details of the MH3DT network and explores aspects such as degree, diameter, cost, average distance, arc connectivity, bisection width, and wiring complexity. We also present a deadlock-free routing algorithm for the MH3DT network using two virtual channels and evaluate the network's dynamic communication performance under the uniform traffic pattern, using the proposed routing algorithm. It is shown that the MH3DT network possesses several attractive features including small diameter, small cost, small average distance, better bisection width, and better dynamic communication performance.

A frequency selection algorithm leveraging the capability of a handset to autonomously select idle channels of a public communication system for use in a private communication system was previously proposed, and its effectiveness was verified through experiments conducted in a metropolitan area. This paper describes the results of an experiment verifying the algorithm's effectiveness in rural areas with relatively low public communication system traffic.

Since the interference is quite related to the performance of CDMA cellular systems, it is necessary to estimate Other-Cell-Interference Factor (OCIF). Here, starting from OCIF calculation for an aeronautical communication system, we investigate the forward link performance of data packet transmission in which the capacity, throughput and delay of the system are measured. To the numerical results, one can see that the performance of the aeronautical communication system is worse than that for terrestrial cellular systems and also depends logarithmically on both the cell radius and height.

This paper presents a new conic section extraction approach that can extract all conic sections (lines, circles, ellipses, parabolas and hyperbolas) simultaneously. This approach is faster than the conventional approaches with a computational complexity that is O(n), where n is the number of edge pixels, and is robust in the presence of moderate levels of noise. It has been combined with a classification tree to produce an offline character recognition system that is invariant to scale, rotation, and translation. The system was tested with synthetic images and with images scanned from real world sources with good results.

In this paper, we describe an accelerative current-programming method for active matrix OLED (AM-OLED) display. This new method uses common source configuration, "Acceleration Control" line and some mechanisms to prevent the programming current from flowing through OLED device. It would solve the basic problem of the current-programming pixel circuit: a long programming period, especially at the dark gray-level. The proposed method accelerates the current programming process at any gray levels, and it would be the solution for the problem.

We study photonic packet switches to support asynchronously arriving variable-length packets. A scheduler for contention resolution is operated in electrical domain even when data street of the buffer is provided in optical domain. In this scheme, the scheduler may be a bottleneck. To compensate the gap of high-speed optical transmission and slow-speed electronic processing, we propose a multi-stage fiber delay line (FDL) buffer architecture that forms a tree structure in which each node has a block of FDLs and a scheduler. This is especially useful for output-buffer switches in which scheduling complexity is proportional to the number of ports of the packet switch. Through a newly-developed approximate analytical method, we show the optimum unit length of the fiber delay lines to decrease packet loss probability. We also show the sufficient number of FDLs in the two-stage buffer.

This paper proposes a scattered-pilot-OFDM reception scheme employing turbo inter-carrier interference (ICI) cancellation in the fast varying fading environments of mobile communications. In the OFDM transmission, the orthogonality among the subcarriers cannot hold due to large Doppler shift, and the OFDM signal suffers from severe degradation due to ICI. The proposed receiver carries out two modes: (i) a coherent detection (CD) mode, and (ii) a turbo ICI cancellation (TC) mode. Initially, the receiver performs the CD mode. When any decision errors are detected, it shifts from the CD mode to the TC one that carries out both the ICI cancellation and the channel estimation by using the decoder output (the log likelihood ratio). In addition, the iteration of the TC mode can improve the accuracy of the channel estimation and ICI cancellation ability. Computer simulations following specifications for the mobile reception mode in the digital terrestrial television broadcasting demonstrate that the receiver can effectively cancel ICI due to the fast varying fading, and that its average BER performance is much better than that of CD.

Electronic voting is a prime application of cryptographic tools. Many researches are addressing election or confidence voting in this area. We address a new type of voting scheme "Divisible Voting Scheme," in which each voter has multiple ballots where the number of ballots can be different among the voters. This type of voting is popular. We first define the divisible voting scheme and show naive protocols based on existing voting schemes. Then we propose two efficient divisible voting schemes. The first scheme uses multisets, the second scheme uses L-adic representation of the number of ballots. The total cost for a voter is O(M 2 log (N)) in the first scheme and O(M log (N)) in the second scheme where M is the number of candidates to vote for and N is the number of ballots for a voter.

In order to fabricate nano-gap electrodes for organic field effect transistors (OFETs), we proposed a simple technique to fabricate the nano-gap electrodes using over etching method. The gap was controlled about 250 nm on Si substrate. We have succeeded making nano-gap electrodes whose resistance was 7.5 TΩ. Then, the nano-gap electrodes as source-drain electrodes were applied to OFETs and characteristics were measured. The Id-Vd characteristics of the similar value as OFETs with micron channel were observed.

It is important to predict serious deterioration of telecommunication quality. This paper investigates predicting such serious events by analyzing only a "short" period (i.e., a "small" amount) of teletraffic data. To achieve this end, this paper presents a method for analyzing the tail distributions of teletraffic state variables, because tail distributions are suitable for representing serious events. This method is based on Extreme Value Theory (EVT), which provides a firm theoretical foundation for the analysis. To be more precise, in this paper, we use throughput data measured on an actual network during daily busy hours for 15 minutes, and use its first 10 seconds (known data) to analyze the tail distribution. Then, we evaluate how well the obtained tail distribution can predict the tail distribution of the remaining 890 seconds (unknown data). The results indicate that the obtained tail distribution based on EVT by analyzing the small amount of known data can predict the tail distribution of unknown data much better than methods based on empirical or log-normal distributions. Furthermore, we apply the obtained tail distribution to predict the peak throughput in unknown data. The results of this paper enable us to predict serious deterioration events with lower measurement cost.

The polarized absorption measurement was employed to investigate the orientational order of the 4-n-4-pentyl-cyanobiphenyl (5CB) film of sub-nanometer thick. It was confirmed that this optical technique is simple but effective to observe the second orientational order parameter, S2, of the organic ultra thin film at the interface region.

Personal communication service (PCS) networks support the delivery of communication services as the mobile user moves from one region to another. When a mobile user receives a call, the network has to quickly determine its current location. The existing approach suffers from high delay in locating the mobile since the mobile's current location has to be always consulted on the location databases. Caching the location of the remote mobile is useful to reduce this delay. However, the longer the useless record caused by the movement of the mobile remains in a cache, the higher the degradation of cache memory utilization is imposed on a system. In this paper, we propose an efficient caching scheme that a cached record is not allowed to remain over the predefined time, called a time-threshold, in a cache. A long time-threshold may cause to increase the obsoleteness of the cached record. In contrast, a short time-threshold may cause to degrade memory utilization. This paper finds the optimal time-threshold to enlarge cache memory utilization. Also, we provide a unique solution for determining the optimal time-threshold, and study the effects of changing the important parameters of mobility, calling patterns, and network conditions on the optimal time-threshold. Furthermore, we compare the performance of the proposed caching call delivery scheme and the existing call delivery schemes.

Displaying a 3D geometric model of a user in real time is an advantage for a telecommunication system because depth information is useful for nonverbal communication such as finger-pointing and gesturing that contain 3D information. However, the range image acquired by a rangefinder suffers from errors due to image noises and distortions in depth measurement. On the other hand, a 2D image is free from such errors. In this paper, we propose a new method for a shared space communication system that combines the advantages of both 2D and 3D representations. A user is represented as a 3D geometric model in order to exchange nonverbal communication cues. A background is displayed as a 2D image to give the user adequate information about the environment of the remote site. Additionally, a high-resolution texture taken by a video camera is projected onto the 3D geometric model of the user. This is done because the low resolution of the image acquired by the rangefinder makes it difficult to exchange facial expressions. Furthermore, to fill in the data occluded by the user, old pixel values are used for the user area in the 2D background image. We have constructed a prototype of a high presence shared space communication system based on our method. Through a number of experiments, we have found that our method is more effective for telecommunication than a method with only a 2D or 3D representation.

The luminance of about 10,000 cd/m2 at an applied voltage of 9.2 V and the external emission efficiency 5.5 cd/A at an injection current density of 50 mA/cm2 have been obtained from an organic light emitting diode (OLED) using starburst molecule doped with 5,6,11,12-tetraphenylnaphthacene fabricated by wet-processing. We demonstrate that the OLEDs fabricated by wet-processing can be applied to fields of short range optical communication as the electro-optical conversion device for transmitting the signals of moving picture.

FEC (Forward Error Correction) is widely used to recover packet loss over the Internet since it does not involve additional network delay. However, FEC still needs much additional network bandwidth for redundancy, and does not consider the priority or the importance of video frames to generate redundant data. In this paper, we present Periodic FEC (PFEC) to make up for the shortcomings of FEC. PFEC divides frames into high-priority frames and low-priority frames, and gives redundancy only to high-priority frames. As specific examples, we describe two types of PFEC: Media-Independent PFEC and Media-Dependant PFEC. Moreover, based on the two-state continuous time Markov chain, we propose redundancy control algorithms of the PFEC schemes that can adjust the amount of redundancy to optimal levels depending on network loss conditions. For better performance, we also consider UEP (Unequal Error Protection) based on PFEC that gives redundancy to low-priority frames as well as high-priority frames. Experimental results show that compared with FEC, PFEC reduces the amount of redundancy considerably but degrades PSNR slightly, and UEP based on PFEC economizes redundancy without the degradation of the PSNR.

We have demonstrated improvement in the efficiency of TDAPB-based OLEDs. The external quantum efficiency of 8.2% and a power efficiency of 17.3 lm/W were achieved. The results suggest that using the starburst small-molecule TDAPB allows for easy fabrication and is effective for achieving high efficiencies in simple device structures.