Data stored in non-volatile memories may be destructed due to crosstalk and radiation but we can restore their data by using error-correcting codes. However, non-volatile memories consume a large amount of energy in writing. How to reduce maximum writing bits even using error-correcting codes is one of the challenges in non-volatile memory design. In this paper, we first propose Doughnut code which is based on state encoding limiting maximum and minimum Hamming distances. After that, we propose a code expansion method, which improves maximum and minimum Hamming distances. When we apply our code expansion method to Doughnut code, we can obtain a code which reduces maximum-flipped bits and has error-correcting ability equal to Hamming code. Experimental results show that the proposed code efficiently reduces the number of maximum-writing bits.

In this paper, the repeatable hybrid parallel implementation of inverse matrix computation using SMW formula is proposed. The authors' had previously proposed a hybrid parallel algorithm for inverse matrix computation. It is reasonably fast for a one time computation of an inverse matrix, but it is hard to apply this algorithm repeatedly for consecutive computations since the relocation of the large matrix is required at the beginning of each iterations. In order to eliminate the relocation of the large input matrix which is the output of the inverse matrix computation from the previous time step, the computation algorithm has been redesigned so that the required portion of the input matrix becomes the same as the output portion of the previously computed matrix in each node. This makes it possible to repeatedly and efficiently apply the SMW formula to compute inverse matrix in a time-series simulation.

A conventional HMM-based speech synthesis system for Hanoi Vietnamese often suffers from hoarse quality due to incomplete F0 parameterization of glottalized tones. Since estimating F0 from glottalized waveform is rather problematic for usual F0 extractors, we propose a pitch marking algorithm where pitch marks are propagated from regular regions of a speech signal to glottalized ones, from which complete F0 contours for the glottalized tones are derived. The proposed F0 parameterization scheme was confirmed to significantly reduce the hoarseness whilst slightly improving the tone naturalness of synthetic speech by both objective and listening tests. The pitch marking algorithm works as a refinement step based on the results of an F0 extractor. Therefore, the proposed scheme can be combined with any F0 extractor.

Cassuto and Blaum proposed new error correcting codes which are called symbol-pair codes. They presented a coding framework for channels whose outputs are overlapping pairs of symbols in storage applications. Such channels are called symbol-pair read channels. The pair distance and pair error are used in symbol-pair read channels. Cassuto et al. and Yaakobi et al. presented decoding algorithms for symbol-pair codes. However, their decoding algorithms cannot always correct errors whose number is not more than half the minimum pair distance. In this paper, we propose a new decoding algorithm using syndromes of symbol-pair codes. In addition, we show that the proposed algorithm can correct all pair errors within the pair error correcting capability.

In the routing design of interposer and etc., the combination of a pin pair to be connected by wire is often flexible, and the reductions of the total wire length and the length difference are pursued to keep the circuit performance. Even though the total wire length can be minimized by finding a minimum cost maximum flow in set pair routing problems, the length difference is often large, and the reduction of it is not easy. In this paper, an algorithm that reduces the length difference while keeping the total wire length small is proposed. In the proposed algorithm, an initial routing first obtained by a minimum cost maximum flow. Then it is modified to reduce the maximum length while keeping the minimum total wire length, and a connection of the minimum length is detoured to reduce the length difference. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is confirmed by experiments.

In this paper, we propose a method for designing finite impulse response (FIR) filters with canonic signed digit (CSD) coefficients using particle swarm optimization (PSO). In such a design problem, a large number of local minimums appear in an evaluation function for the optimization. An updating procedure of PSO tends to stagnate around such local minimums and thus indicates a premature convergence property. Therefore, a new framework for avoiding such a situation is proposed, in which the evaluation function is modified around the stagnation point. Several design examples are shown to present the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Route guidance system is one of the essential components of a vehicle navigation system in ITS. In this paper, a centrally determined route guidance system is established to solve congestion problems. The Sarsa learning method is used to guide vehicles, and global and local parameter strategy is proposed to adjust the vehicle guidance by considering the whole traffic system and local traffic environment, respectively. The proposed method can save the average driving time and relieve traffic congestion. The evaluation was done using two cases on different road networks. The experimental results show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

This paper introduces a fast image denoising algorithm by estimating noise parameters without prior information about the noise. Under the assumption that additive noise has a Gaussian distribution, the noise parameters were estimated from an observed degraded image, and were used to define the constraints of a noise detection process that was coupled with a Markov random field (MRF). In addition, an adaptive modified weighted Gaussian filter with variable window sizes defined by the constraints on noise detection was used to control the degree of smoothness of the reconstructed image. Experimental results demonstrate the capability of the proposed algorithm.

A 300-GHz hetero-generous package solution with a combination of a polyimide microstrip-to-waveguide transition on low-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) is presented. To assemble three parts — a metal back-short, polyimide transition, and LTCC substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) — a ridged microstructure beside the microstrip probe was implemented to reduce the air gap on the broadwall of a back-short. A back-to-back transition exhibited an insertion loss of 4.4 dB at 300 GHz and 49-GHz bandwidth with less than a 10-dB return loss. By evaluating loss of the microstrip line and SIW, we estimated the loss for a single transition, which was 0.9 dB at 300 GHz. The probe transition with ridged metal successfully suppressed the unwanted dip in transmission characteristics and eased the difficulty in assembly. The compact transition is easy to integrate in an antenna-in-package with an MMIC chip by combining suitable substrate materials for the transition and package.

To analyze the structure of a set of high-dimensional perfect sequences over a composition algebra over R, we developed the theory of Fourier transforms of the set of such sequences. We define the discrete cosine transform and the discrete sine transform, and we show that there exists a relationship between these transforms and a convolution of sequences. By applying this property to a set of perfect sequences, we obtain a parameterization theorem. Using this theorem, we show the equivalence between the left perfectness and right perfectness of sequences. For sequences of real numbers, we obtain the parameterization without restrictions on the parameters.

Intelligent information systems captivate people's attention. Examples of such systems include driving support vehicles capable of sensing driver state and communication robots capable of interacting with humans. Modeling how people search visual information is indispensable for designing these kinds of systems. In this paper, we focus on human visual attention, which is closely related to visual search behavior. We propose a computational model to estimate human visual attention while carrying out a visual target search task. Existing models estimate visual attention using the ratio between a representative value of visual feature of a target stimulus and that of distractors or background. The models, however, can not often achieve a better performance for difficult search tasks that require a sequentially spotlighting process. For such tasks, the linear separability effect of a visual feature distribution should be considered. Hence, we introduce this effect to spatially localized activation. Concretely, our top-down model estimates target-specific visual attention using Fisher's variance ratio between a visual feature distribution of a local region in the field of view and that of a target stimulus. We confirm the effectiveness of our computational model through a visual search experiment.

A graph G is two-disjoint-cycle-cover r-pancyclic if for any integer l satisfying r≤l≤|V(G)|-r, there exist two vertex-disjoint cycles C1 and C2 in G such that the lengths of C1 and C2 are |V(G)|-l and l, respectively, where |V(G)| denotes the total number of vertices in G. In particular, the graph G is two-disjoint-cycle-cover vertex r-pancyclic if for any two distinct vertices u and v of G, there exist two vertex-disjoint cycles C1 and C2 in G such that (i) C1 contains u, (ii) C2 contains v, and (iii) the lengths of C1 and C2 are |V(G)|-l and l, respectively, for any integer l satisfying r≤l≤|V(G)|-r. Moreover, G is two-disjoint-cycle-cover edge r-pancyclic if for any two vertex-disjoint edges (u,v) and (x,y) of G, there exist two vertex-disjoint cycles C1 and C2 in G such that (i) C1 contains (u,v), (ii) C2 contains (x,y), and (iii) the lengths of C1 and C2 are |V(G)|-l and l, respectively, for any integer l satisfying r≤l≤|V(G)|-r. In this paper, we first give Dirac-type sufficient conditions for general graphs to be two-disjoint-cycle-cover vertex/edge 3-pancyclic, and we also prove that the n-dimensional crossed cube CQn is two-disjoint-cycle-cover 4-pancyclic for n≥3, vertex 4-pancyclic for n≥5, and edge 6-pancyclic for n≥5.

In this study, we propose and fabricate an oscillator array composed of three resonant-tunneling-diode terahertz oscillators integrated with slot-coupled patch antennas, and which does not require a Si lens. We measure the radiation pattern for single and arrayed oscillator, and calculate the output power using the integration of the pattern. The output power of a single oscillator was found to be ～15 µW. However, using an array configuration, almost combined output power of ～55 µW was obtained.

The researches on model-based testing mainly focus on the models with single component, such as FSM and EFSM. For the network protocols which have multiple components communicating with messages, CFSM is a widely accepted solution. But in some network protocols, parallel and data-shared components maybe exist in the same network entity. It is infeasible to precisely specify such protocol by existing models. In this paper we present a new model, Parallel Parameterized Extended Finite State Machine (PaP-EFSM). A protocol system can be modeled with a group of PaP-EFSMs. The PaP-EFSMs work in parallel and they can read external variables form each other. We present a 2-stage test generation approach for our new models. Firstly, we generate test sequences for internal variables of each machine. They may be non-executable due to external variables. Secondly, we process the external variables. We make the sequences for internal variables executable and generate more test sequences for external variables. For validation, we apply this method to the conformance testing of real-life protocols. The devices from different vendors are tested and implementation faults are exposed.

In this paper, we investigate the fault-tolerant Hamiltonian problems of crossed cubes with a faulty path. More precisely, let P denote any path in an n-dimensional crossed cube CQn for n ≥ 5, and let V(P) be the vertex set of P. We show that CQn-V(P) is Hamiltonian if |V(P)|≤n and is Hamiltonian connected if |V(P)| ≤ n-1. Compared with the previous results showing that the crossed cube is (n-2)-fault-tolerant Hamiltonian and (n-3)-fault-tolerant Hamiltonian connected for arbitrary faults, the contribution of this paper indicates that the crossed cube can tolerate more faulty vertices if these vertices happen to form some specific types of structures.

This paper addresses the problem of job scheduling in volunteer computing (VC) systems where each computation job is replicated and allocated to multiple participants (workers) to remove incorrect results by a voting mechanism. In the job scheduling of VC, the number of workers to complete a job is an important factor for the system performance; however, it cannot be fixed because some of the workers may secede in real VC. This is the problem that existing methods have not considered in the job scheduling. We propose a dynamic job scheduling method which considers the expected probability of completion (EPC) for each job based on the probability of worker's secession. The key idea of the proposed method is to allocate jobs so that EPC is always greater than a specified value (SPC). By setting SPC as a reasonable value, the proposed method enables to complete jobs without excess allocation, which leads to the higher performance of VC systems. We assume in this paper that worker's secession probability follows Weibull-distribution which is known to reflect more practical situation. We derive parameters for the distribution using actual trace data and compare the performance of the proposed and the previous method under the Weibull-distribution model, as well as the previous constant probability model. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed method is up to 5 times higher than that of the existing method especially when the time for completing jobs is restricted, while keeping the error rate lower than a required value.

The harmonious coloring of an undirected simple graph is a vertex coloring such that adjacent vertices are assigned different colors and each pair of colors appears together on at most one edge. The harmonious chromatic number of a graph is the least number of colors used in such a coloring. The harmonious chromatic number of a path is known, whereas the problem to find the harmonious chromatic number is NP-hard even for trees with pathwidth at most 2. Hence, we consider the harmonious coloring of trees with pathwidth 1, which are also known as caterpillars. This paper shows the harmonious chromatic number of a caterpillar with at most one vertex of degree more than 2. We also show the upper bound of the harmonious chromatic number of a 3-regular caterpillar.

Crowd collectiveness, i.e., a quantitative metric for collective motion, has received increasing attention in recent years. Most of existing methods build a collective network by assuming each agent in the crowd interacts with neighbors within fixed radius r region or fixed k nearest neighbors. However, they usually use a universal r or k for different crowded scenes, which may yield inaccurate network topology and lead to lack of adaptivity to varying collective motion scenarios, thereby resulting in poor performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose a compressive sensing (CS) based method for measuring crowd collectiveness. The proposed method uncovers the connections among agents from the motion time series by solving a CS problem, which needs not specify an r or k as a priori. A descriptor based on the average velocity correlations of connected agents is then constructed to compute the collectiveness value. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in measuring crowd collectiveness, and performs on par with or better than the state-of-the-art methods.

The next generation high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard achieves high performance by extending the encoding block to 64×64. There are some parallel tools to improve the efficiency for encoder and decoder. However, owing to the dependence of the current prediction block and surrounding block, parallel processing at CU level and Sub-CU level are hard to achieve. In this paper, focusing on the spatial motion vector prediction (SMVP) and temporal motion vector prediction (TMVP), parallel improvement for spatio-temporal prediction algorithms are presented, which can remove the dependency between prediction coding units and neighboring coding units. Using this proposal, it is convenient to process motion estimation in parallel, which is suitable for different parallel platforms such as multi-core platform, compute unified device architecture (CUDA) and so on. The simulation experiment results demonstrate that based on HM12.0 test model for different test sequences, the proposed algorithm can improve the advanced motion vector prediction with only 0.01% BD-rate increase that result is better than previous work, and the BDPSNR is almost the same as the HEVC reference software.

Liquid crystal displays (LCDs) are suitable as elements underlying wearable and ubiquitous computing thanks to their low power consumption. A technique that uses less power to drive 1-pixel LCDs is proposed. It harvests the charges on the LCD and stores them in an external capacitor for reuse when the polarity changes. A simulation shows that the charge reduction depends on the ratio of the capacitance of the external capacitor to that of the LCD and can reach 50%. An experiment on a prototype demonstrates an almost 30% reduction with large 1-pixel LCDs. With a small 10 × 10mm2 LCD, the overhead of the micro-controller matches the reduction so no improvement could be measured. Though the technique requires longer time for polarity reversal, we confirm that it does not significantly degrade visual quality.