Layout strategies including source edge to substrate space (SESS) and inserted substrate-pick stripes of gate-grounded NMOS(ggNMOS) are optimized in this work for on-chip electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection. In order to fully investigate influences of substrate resistors on triggering and conduction behaviors of ggNMOS, various devices are designed and fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS process. Direct current (DC), transmission-line-pulsing (TLP), human body model (HBM) and very-fast TLP (VF-TLP) tests are executed to fully characterize performance of fabricated ggNMOS. Test results reveal that an enlarged SESS parameter results in an earlier triggering behavior of ggNMOS, which presents a layout option for subtle adjustable triggering behaviors. Besides, inserted substrate-pick stripes are proved to have a bell-shape influence on the ESD robustness of ggNMOS and this bell-shape influence is valid in TLP, HBM and VF-TLP tests. Moreover, the most ESD-robust ggNMOS optimized under different inserted substrate-pick stripes always achieves a higher HBM level over the traditional ggNMOS at each concerned total device-width. Physical mechanisms of test results will be deeply discussed in this work.

It is crucial to promote interdisciplinary research and recommend collaborators from different research fields via academic database analysis. This paper addresses a problem to characterize researchers' interests with a set of diverse research topics found in a large-scale academic database. Specifically, we first use latent Dirichlet allocation to extract topics as distributions over words from a training dataset. Then, we convert the textual features of a researcher's publications to topic vectors, and calculate the centroid of these vectors to summarize the researcher's interest as a single vector. In experiments conducted on CiNii Articles, which is the largest academic database in Japan, we show that the extracted topics reflect the diversity of the research fields in the database. The experiment results also indicate the applicability of the proposed topic representation to the author disambiguation problem.

The the depth-of-field limitation of our eyes causes out-of-focus blur in the retinal images. The blur dynamically changes whenever we change our gaze and accordingly the scene point we are looking at changes its depth. This paper proposes an image display that reproduces retinal out-of-focus blur by using a stereoscopic display and eye trackers. Its purpose is to provide the viewer with more realistic visual experiences than conventional (stereoscopic) displays. Unlike previous similar systems that track only one of the viewer's eyes to estimate the gaze depth, the proposed system tracks both eyes individually using two eye trackers and estimates the gaze depth from the convergence angle calculated by triangulation. This provides several advantages over existing schemes, such as being able to deal with scenes having multiple depths. We describe detailed implementations of the proposed system and show the results of an experiment conducted to examine its effectiveness. In the experiment, creating a scene having two depths using two LCD displays together with a half mirror, we examined how difficult it is for viewers to distinguish between the real scene and its virtual reproduction created by the proposed display system. The results of the experiment show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Piccolo is a lightweight block cipher proposed by Sony Corporation in 2011. The designers showed two key modes, Piccolo-80 and Piccolo-128, which use an 80-bit secret key and a 128-bit one, respectively. Isobe and Shibutani estimated the security of Piccolo-80, and they showed that 14-round (reduced) Piccolo-80 w/o whitening keys is vulnerable against the Meet-in-the-Middle attack. The time complexity of their attack is about 273, but unfortunately it requires 264 texts, namely, the full code book. In this paper, we propose a new impossible differential attack against 14-round Piccolo-80 w/o whitening keys, and it can recover the secret key without relying on the full code book. The time complexity is 268 and it uses 262.2 distinct know plaintexts.

This paper describes a hierarchical and cooperative transport system with demand responsive buses to improve service quality of public transport system in city area and its suburbs. To provide the demand responsive buses generally requires planning route and schedule called dial-a-ride problem. However, the problem complexity increases with the increasing of the number of requests. Therefore, we propose the hierarchical and cooperative transport system. Framework of the system can reduce scale of the problem by grouping customers. We have evaluated the proposed system on a static simulation and a dynamic microscopic simulation. The simulation result has shown the system could improve service quality by reducing customer's load. Moreover, the result of the dynamic simulation have provided the detailed features of the system.

We propose part-segment (PS) features for estimating an articulated pose in still images. The PS feature evaluates the image likelihood of each body part (e.g. head, torso, and arms) robustly to background clutter and nuisance textures on the body. While general gradient features (e.g. HOG) might include many nuisance responses, the PS feature represents only the region of the body part by iterative segmentation while updating the shape prior of each part. In contrast to similar segmentation features, part segmentation is improved by part-specific shape priors that are optimized by training images with fully-automatically obtained seeds. The shape priors are modeled efficiently based on clustering for fast extraction of PS features. The PS feature is fused complementarily with gradient features using discriminative training and adaptive weighting for robust and accurate evaluation of part similarity. Comparative experiments with public datasets demonstrate improvement in pose estimation by the PS features.

We realize homogenous luminance of the directional backlight for the time-division multiplexing autostereoscopic display using a convex lens array with the elemental lenses whose phase of placement in each row differs from one another. The validity of the proposed optical design is confirmed by a prototype system.

Recently ICT has been improved rapidly, and it is likely to make a contribution to effective disaster response. However, ICT is not utilized effectively in disaster response because the environment for ICT management is not considered enough. In this paper, we retrieve lessons learned from actual response at the past disasters in Japan, and introduce them following disaster response process model based on human psychological manner. In another point, we suggest significance of Common Operational Picture with spatial information following advanced case study in the United States of America, and identify two essential issues for effective information and technology management. One is information status, such as statics or dynamic information. The other one is five elements for ICT management in disaster response: Governance, Standard Operating Procedures, Technology, Training and Exercise and Use.

Fast simulation techniques of large scale RLC networks with nonlinear devices are presented. Generally, when scale of nonlinear part in a circuit is much less than the linear part, matrix or circuit partitioning approach is known to be efficient. In this paper, these partitioning techniques are used for the conventional transient analysis using an implicit numerical integration and the circuit-based finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method, whose efficiency and accuracy are evaluated developing a prototype simulator. It is confirmed that the matrix and circuit partitioning approaches do not degrade accuracy of the transient simulations that is compatible to SPICE, and that the circuit partitioning approach is superior to the matrix one in efficiency. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the circuit-based FDTD method can be efficiently combined with the matrix or circuit partitioning approach, compared with the transient analysis using an implicit numerical integration.

Topic features are useful in improving text summarization. However, independency among topics is a strong restriction on most topic models, and alleviating this restriction can deeply capture text structure. This paper proposes a hybrid topic model to generate multi-document summaries using a combination of the Hidden Topic Markov Model (HTMM), the surface texture model and the topic transition model. Based on the topic transition model, regular topic transition probability is used during generating summary. This approach eliminates the topic independence assumption in the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model. Meanwhile, the results of experiments show the advantage of the combination of the three kinds of models. This paper includes alleviating topic independency, and integrating surface texture and shallow semantic in documents to improve summarization. In short, this paper attempts to realize an advanced summarization system.

Fault localization is essential for conducting effective program repair. However, preliminary studies have shown that existing fault localization approaches do not take the requirements of automatic repair into account, and therefore restrict the repair performance. To address this issue, this paper presents the first study on designing fault localization approaches for automatic program repair, that is, we propose a fault localization approach using failure-related contexts in order to improve automatic program repair. The proposed approach first utilizes program slicing technique to construct a failure-related context, then evaluates the suspiciousness of each element in this context, and finally transfers the result of evaluation to automatic program repair techniques for performing repair on faulty programs. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective to improve automatic repair performance.

We present a time-to-digital converter (TDC) achieving sub-picosecond resolution and high precision for all-digital phase-locked-loops (ADPLLs). The basic idea is using a charge pump to translate time interval into charge, and a successive-approximation-register-analog-to-digital converter (SAR-ADC) to quantize the charge. With this less complex configuration, high resolution, high precision, low power, and small area can be achieved all together. We analyzed the noise contribution from the charge pump and describe detailed design and implementation for sizing the capacitor and transistors, with the awareness of noise and linearity. The analysis demonstrates the proposed TDC capable of sub-picosecond resolution and high precision. Two prototype chips were fabricated in 65nm CMOS with 0.06mm2, and 0.018mm2 core areas, respectively. The achieved resolutions are 0.84ps and 0.80ps, in 8-bit and 10-bit range, respectively. The measured single-shot-precisions range from 0.22 to 0.6ps, and from 0.66 to 1.04ps, respectively, showing consistent trends with the analysis. Compared with state-of-the-arts, best performance balance has been achieved.

A transmission ellipsometric method without an aperture was recently developed to characterize the electro-optic (EO) performance of EO polymers. The method permits much simpler optical setup compared to the reflection method, and allows easy performance of the incident angle dependence measurements using a conventional glass substrate and uncollimated beam. This paper shows the usefulness of this method for a simple and reliable evaluation of the EO coefficient both for organic and inorganic EO materials, as well as analysis for uniaxial anisotropic materials.

We have improved a compact model for the injection-enhancedinsulated-gate bipolar transistor for inverter circuit simulation. The holeaccumulation of floating-base region and potential change are modeled. It turned out that negative capacitance which occurs by floating-base region has the dependence of frequency. It is necessary to consider the frequency dependence of the total gate capacitance for transient simulation. We analyzed the relationship between negative gate capacitance and current rise rate at the switch turn-on timing and device structure. The development model simulation result is well reproduced $I_{ extrm{c}}$ and $V_{ extrm{ce}}$ of measurement data, and the switching loss calculation accuracy is improved.

Understanding the structure and evolution of spatial-temporal networks is crucial for different fields ranging from urbanism to epidemiology. As location based technologies are pervasively used in our daily life, large amount of sensing data has brought the opportunities to study human activities and city dynamics. Ubiquitous cell phones can be such a sensor to analyze the social connection and boundaries of geographical regions. In this paper, we exploit user mobility based on large-scale mobile phone records to study urban areas. We collect the call data records from 1 million anonymous subscribers of 8 weeks and study the user mobility flux between different regions. First we construct the urban areas as a spatial network and use modularity detection algorithm to study the intrinsic connection between map areas. Second, another generative model which is widely used in linguistic context is adopted to explore the functions of regions. Based on mobile call records we are able to derive the partitions which match boundaries of the administrative districts. Our results can also catch the dynamics of urban area as the basis for city planning and policy making.

The parallel interference cancellation (PIC) multiple input multiple output (MIMO) detection algorithm has bit error ratio (BER) performance comparable to the maximum likelihood (ML) algorithm but with complexity close to the simple linear detection algorithm such as zero forcing (ZF), minimum mean squared error (MMSE), and successive interference cancellation (SIC), etc. However, the throughput of PIC MIMO detector on central processing unit (CPU) cannot meet the requirement of wireless protocols. In order to reach the throughput required by the standards, the graphics processing unit (GPU) is exploited in this paper as the modem processor to accelerate the processing procedure of PIC MIMO detector. The parallelism of PIC algorithm is analyzed and the two-stage PIC detection is carefully developed to efficiently match the multi-core architecture. Several optimization methods are employed to enhance the throughput, such as the memory optimization and asynchronous data transfer. The experiment shows that our MIMO detector has excellent BER performance and the peak throughput is 337.84 Mega bits per second (Mbps), about 7x to 16x faster than that of CPU implementation with SSE2 optimization methods. The implemented MIMO detector has better computing throughput than recent GPU-based implementations.

The research reported in this paper is an attempt to elucidate the predictors of pause duration in read-aloud discourse. Through simple linear regression analysis and stepwise multiple linear regression, we examined how different factors (namely, syntactic structure, discourse hierarchy, topic structure, preboundary length, and postboundary length) influenced pause duration both separately and jointly. Results from simple regression analysis showed that discourse hierarchy, syntactic structure, topic structure, and postboundary length had significant impacts on boundary pause duration. However, when these factors were tested in a stepwise regression analysis, only discourse hierarchy, syntactic structure, and postboundary length were found to have significant impacts on boundary pause duration. The regression model that best predicted boundary pause duration in discourse context was the one that first included syntactic structure, and then included discourse hierarchy and postboundary length. This model could account for about 80% of the variance of pause duration. Tests of mediation models showed that the effects of topic structure and discourse hierarchy were significantly mediated by syntactic structure, which was most closely correlated with pause duration. These results support an integrated model combining the influence of several factors and can be applied to text-to-speech systems.

In the process of production design, engineers usually find it is difficult to seek and reuse others' empirical knowledge which is in the forms of lesson-learned documents. This study proposed a novel approach, which uses a semantic-based topic knowledge map system (STKMS) to support timely and precisely lesson-learned documents finding and reusing. The architecture of STKMS is designed, which has five major functional modules: lesson-learned documents pre-processing, topic extraction, topic relation computation, topic weights computation, and topic knowledge map generation modules. Then STKMS implementation is briefly introduced. We have conducted two sets of experiments to evaluate quality of knowledge map and the performance of utilizing STKMS in outfitting design of a ship-building company. The first experiment shows that knowledge maps generated by STKMS are accepted by domain experts from the evaluation since precision and recall are high. The second experiment shows that STKMS-based group outperforms browse-based group in both learning score and satisfaction level, which are two measurements of performance of utilizing STKMS. The promising results confirm the feasibility of STKMS in helping engineers to find needed lesson-learned documents and reuse related knowledge easily and precisely.

Homotopy methods are known to be effective methods for finding DC operating points of nonlinear circuits with the theoretical guarantee of global convergence. There are several types of homotopy methods; as one of the most efficient methods for solving bipolar transistor circuits, the variable-gain homotopy (VGH) method is well-known. In this paper, we propose an efficient VGH method for solving bipolar and MOS transistor circuits. We also show that the proposed method converges to a stable operating point with high possibility from any initial point. The proposed method is not only globally convergent but also more efficient than the conventional VGH methods. Moreover, it can easily be implemented in SPICE.

A number of studies have been conducted on topic modeling for various types of data, including text and image data. We focus particularly on the burstiness of the local features in modeling topics within video data in this paper. Burstiness is a phenomenon that is often discussed for text data. The idea is that if a word is used once in a document, it is more likely to be used again within the document. It is also observed in video data; for example, an object or visual word in video data is more likely to appear repeatedly within the same video data. Based on the idea mentioned above, we propose a new topic model, the Correspondence Dirichlet Compound Multinomial LDA (Corr-DCMLDA), which takes into account the burstiness of the local features in video data. The unknown parameters and latent variables in the model are estimated by conducting a collapsed Gibbs sampling and the hyperparameters are estimated by focusing on the fixed-point iterations. We demonstrate through experimentation on the genre classification of social video data that our model works more effectively than several baselines.