An optimal design method for a sub-ranging Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) based on stochastic comparator is demonstrated by performing theoretical analysis of random comparator offset voltages. If the Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) of the comparator offset is defined appropriately, we can calculate the PDFs of the output code and the effective resolution of a stochastic comparator. It is possible to model the analog-to-digital conversion accuracy (defined as yield) of a stochastic comparator by assuming that the correlations among the number of comparator offsets within different analog steps corresponding to the Least Significant Bit (LSB) of the output transfer function are negligible. Comparison with Monte Carlo simulation verifies that the proposed model precisely estimates the yield of the ADC when it is designed for a reasonable target yield of >0.8. By applying this model to a stochastic comparator we reveal that an additional calibration significantly enhances the resolution, i.e., it increases the Number of Bits (NOB) by ∼ 2 bits for the same target yield. Extending the model to a stochastic-comparator-based sub-ranging ADC indicates that the ADC design parameters can be tuned to find the optimal resource distribution between the deterministic coarse stage and the stochastic fine stage.

The k-edge-connectivity augmentation problem with multipartition constraints (kECAMP, for short) is defined by “Given a multigraph G=(V,E) and a multipartition π={V1,...,Vr} (r≥2) of V, that is, $V = igcup_{h = 1}^r V_h$ and Vi∩Vj=∅ (1≤i

This letter presents a 12-bit column-parallel hybrid two-step successive approximation register/single-slope analog-to-digital converter (SAR/SS ADC) for CMOS image sensor (CIS). For achieving a high conversion speed, a simple SAR ADC is used in upper 6-bit conversion and a conventional SS ADC is used in lower 6-bit conversion. To reduce the power consumption, a comparator is shared in each column, and a 6-bit ramp generator is shared by all columns. This ADC is designed in SMIC 0.18µm CMOS process. At a clock frequency of 22.7MHz, the conversion time is 3.2µs. The ADC has a DNL of -0.31/+0.38LSB and an INL of -0.86/+0.8LSB. The power consumption of each column ADC is 89µW and the ramp generator is 763µW.

This paper proposes a consensus-based distributed Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm with event-triggered communications for a non-convex and non-differentiable optimization problem. We consider a multi-agent system whose local communications among agents are represented by a fixed and connected graph. Each agent has multiple particles as estimated solutions of global optima and updates positions of particles by an average consensus dynamics on an auxiliary variable that accumulates the past information of the own objective function. In contrast to the existing time-triggered approach, the local communications are carried out only when the difference between the current auxiliary variable and the variable at the last communication exceeds a threshold. We show that the global best can be estimated in a distributed way by the proposed event-triggered PSO algorithm under a diminishing condition of the threshold for the trigger condition.

This paper presents the Received-Signal-Strength-Indicator (RSSI) based living-body radar, which uses only a single RF front-end and a few parasitic antennas. This radar measures the RSSI variation at the single active antenna while varying the terminations of the parasitic antennas. The propagation channel is estimated from just the temporal transition of RSSI; our proposal reconstructs the phase information of the signal. In this paper, we aim to estimate the direction of living-body. Experiments are carried out and it is found that most angular errors are within the limit of the angular width of the living-body.

This paper proposes a novel method for two-dimensional (2-D) direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of multiple signals employing a sparse L-shaped array structured by a sparse linear array (SLA), a sparse uniform linear array (SULA) and an auxiliary sensor. In this method, the elevation angles are estimated by using the SLA and an efficient search approach, while the azimuth angle estimation is performed in two stages. In the first stage, the rough azimuth angle estimates are obtained by utilizing a noise-free cross-covariance matrix (CCM), the estimated elevation angles and data from three sensors including the auxiliary sensor. In the second stage, the fine azimuth angle estimates can be achieved by using the shift-invariance property of the SULA and the rough azimuth angle estimates. Without extra pair-matching process, the proposed method can achieve automatic pairing of the 2-D DOA estimates. Simulation results show that our approach outperforms the compared methods, especially in the cases of low SNR, snapshot deficiency and multiple sources.

In this paper, the problem of target detection and tracking utilizing the single frequency network (SFN) is addressed. Specifically, by exploiting the characteristics of the signal in SFN, a novel likelihood model which avoids the measurement origin uncertain problem in the point measurement model is proposed. The particle filter based track-before-detect (PF-TBD) algorithm is adopted for the proposed SFN likelihood to detect and track the possibly existed target. The advantage of using TBD algorithm is that it is suitable for the condition of low SNR, and specially, in SFN, it can avoid the data association between the measurement and the transmitters. The performance of the adopted algorithm is examined via simulations.

The main idea of filter methods in feature selection is constructing a feature-assessing criterion and searching for feature subset that optimizes the criterion. The primary principle of designing such criterion is to capture the relevance between feature subset and the class as precisely as possible. It would be difficult to compute the relevance directly due to the computation complexity when the size of feature subset grows. As a result, researchers adopt approximate strategies to measure relevance. Though these strategies worked well in some applications, they suffer from three problems: parameter determination problem, the neglect of feature interaction information and overestimation of some features. We propose a new feature selection algorithm that could compute mutual information between feature subset and the class directly without deteriorating computation complexity based on the computation of partitions. In light of the specific properties of mutual information and partitions, we propose a pruning rule and a stopping criterion to accelerate the searching speed. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, we compare our algorithm to the other five algorithms in terms of the number of selected features and the classification accuracies on three classifiers. The results on the six synthetic datasets show that our algorithm performs well in capturing interaction information. The results on the thirteen real world datasets show that our algorithm selects less yet better feature subset.

In this work, the metal-oxide-metal (MOM) capacitor in the scaled CMOS process has been modeled at high frequencies using an EM simulator, and its layout has been optimized. The modeled parasitic resistance consists of four components, and the modeled parasitic inductance consists of the comb inductance and many mutual inductances. Each component of the parasitic resistance and inductance show different degrees of dependence on the finger length and on the number of fingers. The substrate network parameters also have optimum points. As such, the geometric dependence of the characteristics of the MOM capacitor is investigated and the optimum layout in the constant-capacitance case is proposed by calculating the results of the model. The proposed MOM capacitor structures for 50fF at f =60GHz are L =5μm with M =3, and, L =2μm with M =5 and that for 100fF at f =30GHz are L =9μm with M =3, and L =4μm with M =5. The target process is 65-nm CMOS.

Aiming at solving the performance degradation caused by the covariance matrix mismatch in wideband beamforming for conformal arrays, a novel adaptive beamforming algorithm is proposed in this paper. In this algorithm, the interference-plus-noise covariance matrix is firstly reconstructed to solve the desired signal contamination problem. Then, a sparse reconstruction method is utilized to reduce the high computational cost and the requirement of sampling data. A novel cost function is formulated by the focusing matrix and singular value decomposition. Finally, the optimization problem is efficiently solved in a second-order cone programming framework. Simulation results using a cylindrical array demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm and prove that this algorithm can achieve superior performance over the existing wideband beamforming methods for conformal arrays.

The illegal parking of bicycles is a serious urban problem in Tokyo. The purpose of this study was to sustainably build Linked Open Data (LOD) to assist in solving the problem of illegally parked bicycles (IPBs) by raising social awareness, in cooperation with the Office for Youth Affairs and Public Safety of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (Tokyo Bureau). We first extracted information on the problem factors and designed LOD schema for IPBs. Then we collected pieces of data from the Social Networking Service (SNS) and the websites of municipalities to build the illegally parked bicycle LOD (IPBLOD) with more than 200,000 triples. We then estimated the temporal missing data in the LOD based on the causal relations from the problem factors and estimated spatial missing data based on geospatial features. As a result, the number of IPBs can be inferred with about 70% accuracy, and places where bicycles might be illegally parked are estimated with about 31% accuracy. Then we published the complemented LOD and a Web application to visualize the distribution of IPBs in the city. Finally, we applied IPBLOD to large social activity in order to raise social awareness of the IPB issues and to remove IPBs, in cooperation with the Tokyo Bureau.

Gender classification with hand-dorsa vein information, a new soft biometric trait, is solved with the proposed unsupervised sparse feature learning model, state-of-the-art accuracy demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed model. Besides, we also argue that the proposed data reconstruction model is also applicable to age estimation when comprehensive database differing in age is accessible.

The performance of secret-sharing (SS)-based multiparty computation (MPC) has recently increased greatly, and several efforts to implement and use it have been put into practice. Authentication of clients is one critical mechanism for implementing SS-based MPC successfully in practice. We propose a password-based authentication protocol for SS-based MPC. Our protocol is secure in the presence of secure channels, and it is optimized for practical use with SS-based MPC in the following ways. Threshold security: Our protocol is secure in the honest majority, which is necessary and sufficient since most practical results on SS-based MPC are secure in the same environment. Establishing distinct channels: After our protocol, a client has distinct secure and two-way authenticated channels to each server. Ease of implementation: Our protocol consists of SS, operations involving SS, and secure channels, which can be reused from an implementation of SS-based MPC. Furthermore, we implemented our protocol with an optimization for the realistic network. A client received the result within 2 sec even when the network delay was 200 ms, which is almost the delay that occurs between Japan and Europe.

In this work we utilize feature transformations that are common in supervised learning without having prior supervision, with the goal to improve Dirichlet process Gaussian mixture model (DPGMM) based acoustic unit discovery. The motivation of using such transformations is to create feature vectors that are more suitable for clustering. The need of labels for these methods makes it difficult to use them in a zero resource setting. To overcome this issue we utilize a first iteration of DPGMM clustering to generate frame based class labels for the target data. The labels serve as basis for learning linear discriminant analysis (LDA), maximum likelihood linear transform (MLLT) and feature-space maximum likelihood linear regression (fMLLR) based feature transformations. The novelty of our approach is the way how we use a traditional acoustic model training pipeline for supervised learning to estimate feature transformations in a zero resource scenario. We show that the learned transformations greatly support the DPGMM sampler in finding better clusters, according to the performance of the DPGMM posteriorgrams on the ABX sound class discriminability task. We also introduce a method for combining posteriorgram outputs of multiple clusterings and demonstrate that such combinations can further improve sound class discriminability.

With an annual growth of billions of sensor-based devices, it is an urgent need to do stream mining for the massive data streams produced by these devices. Cloud computing is a competitive choice for this, with powerful computational capabilities. However, it sacrifices real-time feature and energy efficiency. Application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) is with high performance and efficiency, which is not cost-effective for diverse applications. The general-purpose microcontroller is of low performance. Therefore, it is a challenge to do stream mining on these low-cost devices with scalability and efficiency. In this paper, we introduce an FPGA-based scalable and parameterized architecture for stream mining.Particularly, Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) based k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) is adopted in the architecture. Two processing element (PE) rings for DTW and kNN are designed to achieve parameterization and scalability with high performance. We implement the proposed architecture on an FPGA and perform a comprehensive performance evaluation. The experimental results indicate thatcompared to the multi-core CPU-based implementation, our approach demonstrates over one order of magnitude on speedup and three orders of magnitude on energy-efficiency.

A new method is proposed for the construction of pairing-friendly elliptic curves. For any fixed embedding degree, it can transform the problem to solving equation systems instead of exhaustive searching, thus it's more targeted and efficient. Via this method, we obtain various families including complete families, complete families with variable discriminant and sparse families. Specifically, we generate a complete family with important application prospects which has never been given before as far as we know.

One of the problems associated with voice conversion from a nonparallel corpus is how to find the best match or alignment between the source and the target vector sequences without linguistic information. In a previous study, alignment was achieved by minimizing the distance between the source vector and the transformed vector. This method, however, yielded a sequence of feature vectors that were not well matched with the underlying speaker model. In this letter, the vectors were selected from the candidates by maximizing the overall likelihood of the selected vectors with respect to the target model in the HMM context. Both objective and subjective evaluations were carried out using the CMU ARCTIC database to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

A quantized index for evaluating the pattern similarity of two different datasets is designed by calculating the number of correlated dictionary atoms. Guided by this theory, task-specific biometric recognition model transferred from state-of-the-art DNN models is realized for both face and vein recognition.

Photo Diode Array (PDA) is the key semiconductor component expected to produce specified output voltage in photo couplers and photo sensors when the light is on. PDA partitioning problem, which is to design PDA, is: Given die area, anode and cathode points, divide the area into N cells, with identical areas, connected in series from anode to cathode. In this paper, we first make restrictions for the problem and reveal the underlying properties of necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of solutions when the restrictions are satisfied. Then, we propose a method to solve the problem using recursive algorithm, which can be guaranteed to obtain a solution in polynomial time.

Interconnection network is one of the inevitable components in parallel computers, since it is responsible to communication capabilities of the systems. It affects the system-level performance as well as the physical and logical structure of the systems. Although many studies are reported to enhance the interconnection network technology, we have to discuss many issues remaining. One of the most important issues is congestion management. In an interconnection network, many packets are transferred simultaneously and the packets interfere to each other in the network. Congestion arises as a result of the interferences. Its fast spreading speed seriously degrades communication performance and it continues for long time. Thus, we should appropriately control the network to suppress the congested situation for maintaining the maximum performance. Many studies address the problem and present effective methods, however, the maximal performance in an ideal situation is not sufficiently clarified. Solving the ideal performance is, in general, an NP-hard problem. This paper introduces particle swarm optimization (PSO) methodology to overcome the problem. In this paper, we first formalize the optimization problem suitable for the PSO method and present a simple PSO application as naive models. Then, we discuss reduction of the size of search space and introduce three practical variations of the PSO computation models as repetitive model, expansion model, and coding model. We furthermore introduce some non-PSO methods for comparison. Our evaluation results reveal high potentials of the PSO method. The repetitive and expansion models achieve significant acceleration of collective communication performance at most 1.72 times faster than that in the bursty communication condition.