In this paper, we report an experimental and numerical analysis of ultrahigh-speed coherent Nyquist pulse transmission. First, we describe a low-nonlinearity dispersion compensator for ultrahigh-speed coherent Nyquist pulse transmission; it is composed of a chirped fiber Bragg grating (CFBG) and a liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) device. By adopting CFBG instead of inverse dispersion fiber, the nonlinearity in a 160km transmission line was more than halved. Furthermore, by eliminating the group delay fluctuation of the CFBG with an LCoS device, the residual group delay was reduced to as low as 1.42ps over an 11nm bandwidth. Then, by using the transmission line with the newly constructed low-nonlinearity dispersion compensator, we succeeded in improving the BER performance of single-channel 15.3Tbit/s-160km transmission by one-third compared with that of a conventional dispersion-managed transmission line and obtained a spectral efficiency of 8.7bit/s/Hz. Furthermore, we numerically analyzed the BER performance of its Nyquist pulse transmission. The numerical results showed that the nonlinear impairment in the transmission line is the main factor limiting the transmission performance in a coherent Nyquist pulse transmission, which becomes more significant at higher baud rates.

Running IoT applications on edge computing infrastructures has the benefits of low response times and efficient bandwidth usage. System verification on a testbed is required to deploy IoT applications in production environments. In a testbed, Docker containers are preferable for a smooth transition of tested application programs to production environments. In addition, the round-trip times (RTT) of Docker containers to clients must be ensured, according to the target application's response time requirements. However, in existing testbed systems, the RTTs between Docker containers and clients are not ensured. Thus, we must undergo a large amount of configuration data including RTTs between all pairs of wireless base station nodes and servers to set up a testbed environment. In this paper, we present an edge computing testbed system with simple application programming interfaces (API) for testbed users that ensures RTTs between Docker containers and clients. The proposed system automatically determines which servers to place Docker containers on according to virtual regions and the RTTs specified by the testbed users through APIs. The virtual regions provide reduced size information about the RTTs in a network. In the proposed system, the configuration data size is reduced to one divided by the number of the servers and the command arguments length is reduced to approximately one-third or less, whereas the increased system running time is 4.3s.

Register pushdown system (RPDS) is an extension of pushdown system (PDS) that has registers for dealing with data values. An LTL model checking method for RPDS with regular valuations has been proposed in previous work; however, the method requires the register automata (RA) used for defining a regular valuation to be backward-deterministic. This paper proposes another approach to the same problem, in which the model checking problem for RPDS is reduced to that problem for PDS by constructing a PDS bisimulation equivalent to a given RPDS. This construction is simpler than the previous model checking method and does not require RAs deterministic or backward-deterministic, and the bisimulation equivalence clearly guarantees the correctness of the reduction. On the other hand, the proposed method requires every RPDS (and RA) to have the freshness property, in which whenever the RPDS updates a register with a data value not stored in any register or the stack top, the value should be fresh. This paper also shows that the model checking problem with regular valuations defined by general RA is undecidable, and thus the freshness constraint is essential in the proposed method.

Accurately describing user behaviors with appropriate sensors is always important when developing computing cost-effective systems. This paper employs datasets recorded for fine-grained reading detection using the J!NS MEME, an eye-wear device with electrooculography (EOG), accelerometer, and gyroscope sensors. We generate models for all possible combinations of the three sensors and employ self-supervised learning and supervised learning in order to gain an understanding of optimal sensor settings. The results show that only the EOG sensor performs roughly as well as the best performing combination of other sensors. This gives an insight into selecting the appropriate sensors for fine-grained reading detection, enabling cost-effective computation.

Predicting the grasping point accurately and quickly is crucial for successful robotic manipulation. However, to commercially deploy a robot, such as a dishwasher robot in a commercial kitchen, we also need to consider the constraints of limited usable resources. We present a deep learning method to predict the grasp position when using a single suction gripper for picking up objects. The proposed method is based on a shallow network to enable lower training costs and efficient inference on limited resources. Costs are further reduced by collecting data in a custom-built synthetic environment. For evaluating the proposed method, we developed a system that models a commercial kitchen for a dishwasher robot to manipulate symmetric objects. We tested our method against a model-fitting method and an algorithm-based method in our developed commercial kitchen environment and found that a shallow network trained with only the synthetic data achieves high accuracy. We also demonstrate the practicality of using a shallow network in sequence with an object detector for ease of training, prediction speed, low computation cost, and easier debugging.

Moon-or-Sun, Nagareru, and Nurimeizu are Nikoli's pencil puzzles. We study the computational complexity of Moon-or-Sun, Nagareru, and Nurimeizu puzzles. It is shown that deciding whether a given instance of each puzzle has a solution is NP-complete.

A new software based in-situ training (SBIST) method to achieve high accuracies is proposed for binarized neural networks inference accelerator chips in which measured offsets in sense amplifiers (activation binarizers) are transformed into biases in the training software. To expedite this individual training, the initial values for the weights are taken from results of a common forming training process which is conducted in advance by using the offset fluctuation distribution averaged over the fabrication line. SPICE simulation inference results for the accelerator predict that the accuracy recovers to higher than 90% even when the amplifier offset is as large as 40mV only after a few epochs of the individual training.

In recent years, there has been significant interest in information-theoretic security techniques that encrypt physical layer signals. We have proposed chaos modulation, which has both physical layer security and channel coding gain, as one such technique. In the chaos modulation method, the channel coding gain can be increased using a turbo mechanism that exchanges the log-likelihood ratio (LLR) with an external concatenated code using the max-log approximation. However, chaos modulation, which is a type of Gaussian modulation, does not use fixed mapping, and the distance between signal points is not constant; therefore, the accuracy of the max-log approximated LLR degrades under poor channel conditions. As a result, conventional methods suffer from performance degradation owing to error propagation in turbo decoding. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new LLR clipping method that can be optimally applied to chaos modulation by limiting the confidence level of LLR and suppressing error propagation. For effective clipping on chaos modulation that does not have fixed mappings, the average confidence value is obtained from the extrinsic LLR calculated from the demodulator and decoder, and clipping is performed based on this value, either in the demodulator or the decoder. Numerical results indicated that the proposed method achieves the same performance as the one using the exact LLR, which requires complicated calculations. Furthermore, the security feature of the proposed system is evaluated, and we observe that sufficient security is provided.

This paper presents a novel blind signal separation method for the measurement of pulse waves at multiple body positions using an array radar system. The proposed method is based on a mathematical model of pulse wave propagation. The model relies on three factors: (1) a small displacement approximation, (2) beam pattern orthogonality, and (3) an impulse response model of pulse waves. The separation of radar echoes is formulated as an optimization problem, and the associated objective function is established using the mathematical model. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method using measured radar data from participants lying in a prone position. The accuracy of the proposed method, in terms of estimating the body displacements, is measured using reference data taken from laser displacement sensors. The average estimation errors are found to be 10-21% smaller than those of conventional methods. These results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method for achieving noncontact measurements of the displacements of multiple body positions.

We propose “Temporal Ensemble SSDLite,” a new method for video object detection that boosts accuracy while maintaining detection speed and energy consumption. Object detection for video is becoming increasingly important as a core part of applications in robotics, autonomous driving and many other promising fields. Many of these applications require high accuracy and speed to be viable, but are used in compute and energy restricted environments. Therefore, new methods that increase the overall performance of video object detection i.e., accuracy and speed have to be developed. To increase accuracy we use ensemble, the machine learning method of combining predictions of multiple different models. The drawback of ensemble is the increased computational cost which is proportional to the number of models used. We overcome this deficit by deploying our ensemble temporally, meaning we inference with only a single model at each frame, cycling through our ensemble of models at each frame. Then, we combine the predictions for the last N frames where N is the number of models in our ensemble through non-max-suppression. This is possible because close frames in a video are extremely similar due to temporal correlation. As a result, we increase accuracy through the ensemble while only inferencing a single model at each frame and therefore keeping the detection speed. To evaluate the proposal, we measure the accuracy, detection speed and energy consumption on the Google Edge TPU, a machine learning inference accelerator, with the Imagenet VID dataset. Our results demonstrate an accuracy boost of up to 4.9% while maintaining real-time detection speed and an energy consumption of 181mJ per image.

Reservoir computing (RC) is an attractive alternative to machine learning models owing to its computationally inexpensive training process and simplicity. In this work, we propose EnsembleBloomCA, which utilizes cellular automata (CA) and an ensemble Bloom filter to organize an RC system. In contrast to most existing RC systems, EnsembleBloomCA eliminates all floating-point calculation and integer multiplication. EnsembleBloomCA adopts CA as the reservoir in the RC system because it can be implemented using only binary operations and is thus energy efficient. The rich pattern dynamics created by CA can map the original input into a high-dimensional space and provide more features for the classifier. Utilizing an ensemble Bloom filter as the classifier, the features provided by the reservoir can be effectively memorized. Our experiment revealed that applying the ensemble mechanism to the Bloom filter resulted in a significant reduction in memory cost during the inference phase. In comparison with Bloom WiSARD, one of the state-of-the-art reference work, the EnsembleBloomCA model achieves a 43× reduction in memory cost while maintaining the same accuracy. Our hardware implementation also demonstrated that EnsembleBloomCA achieved over 23× and 8.5× reductions in area and power, respectively.

A vertex subset I of a graph G is called a k-path vertex cover if every path on k vertices in G contains at least one vertex from I. The K-PATH VERTEX COVER RECONFIGURATION (K-PVCR) problem asks if one can transform one k-path vertex cover into another via a sequence of k-path vertex covers where each intermediate member is obtained from its predecessor by applying a given reconfiguration rule exactly once. We investigate the computational complexity of K-PVCR from the viewpoint of graph classes under the well-known reconfiguration rules: TS, TJ, and TAR. The problem for k=2, known as the VERTEX COVER RECONFIGURATION (VCR) problem, has been well-studied in the literature. We show that certain known hardness results for VCR on different graph classes can be extended for K-PVCR. In particular, we prove a complexity dichotomy for K-PVCR on general graphs: on those whose maximum degree is three (and even planar), the problem is PSPACE-complete, while on those whose maximum degree is two (i.e., paths and cycles), the problem can be solved in polynomial time. Additionally, we also design polynomial-time algorithms for K-PVCR on trees under each of TJ and TAR. Moreover, on paths, cycles, and trees, we describe how one can construct a reconfiguration sequence between two given k-path vertex covers in a yes-instance. In particular, on paths, our constructed reconfiguration sequence is shortest.

Parallel computing essentially consists of computation and communication and, in many cases, communication performance is vital. Many parallel applications use collective communications, which often dominate the performance of the parallel execution. This paper focuses on collective communication performance to speed-up the parallel execution. This paper firstly offers our experimental result that splitting a session of collective communication to small portions (slices) possibly enables efficient communication. Then, based on the results, this paper proposes a new concept cup-stacking with a genetic algorithm based methodology. The preliminary evaluation results reveal the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Cryptocurrency abuse has become a critical problem. Due to the anonymous nature of cryptocurrency, criminals commonly adopt cryptocurrency for trading drugs and deceiving people without revealing their identities. Despite its significance and severity, only few works have studied how cryptocurrency has been abused in the real world, and they only provide some limited measurement results. Thus, to provide a more in-depth understanding on the cryptocurrency abuse cases, we present a large-scale analysis on various Bitcoin abuse types using 200,507 real-world reports collected by victims from 214 countries. We scrutinize observable abuse trends, which are closely related to real-world incidents, to understand the causality of the abuses. Furthermore, we investigate the semantics of various cryptocurrency abuse types to show that several abuse types overlap in meaning and to provide valuable insight into the public dataset. In addition, we delve into abuse channels to identify which widely-known platforms can be maliciously deployed by abusers following the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. Consequently, we demonstrate the polarization property of Bitcoin addresses practically utilized on transactions, and confirm the possible usage of public report data for providing clues to track cyber threats. We expect that this research on Bitcoin abuse can empirically reach victims more effectively than cybercrime, which is subject to professional investigation.

We consider a regulation problem for an uncertain chain of integrators with an unknown time-varying delay in the input. To deal with uncertain parameters and unknown delay, we propose an adaptive event-triggered controller with a dynamic gain. We show that the system is globally regulated and interexecution times are lower bounded. Moreover, we show that these lower bounds can be enlarged by adjusting a control parameter. An example is given for clear illustration.

In this study, we develop a numerical method for determining transient energy deposition in biological bodies exposed to electromagnetic (EM) pulses. We use a newly developed frequency-dependent finite-difference time-domain (FD2TD) method, which is combined with the fast inverse Laplace transform (FILT) and Prony method. The FILT and Prony method are utilized to transform the Cole-Cole model of biological media into a sum of multiple Debye relaxation terms. Parameters of Debye terms are then extracted by comparison with the time-domain impulse responses. The extracted parameters are used in an FDTD formulation, which is derived using the auxiliary differential equation method, and transient energy deposition into a biological medium is calculated by the equivalent circuit method. The validity of our proposed method is demonstrated by comparing numerical results and those derived from an analytical method. Finally, transient energy deposition into human heads of TARO and HANAKO models is then calculated using the proposed method and, physical insights into pulse exposures of the human heads are provided.

A Josephson parametric oscillator (JPO) is an interesting system from the viewpoint of quantum optics because it has two stable self-oscillating states and can deterministically generate quantum cat states. A theoretical proposal has been made to operate a network of multiple JPOs as a quantum annealer, which can solve adiabatically combinatorial optimization problems at high speed. Proof-of-concept experiments have been actively conducted for application to quantum computations. This article provides a review of the mechanism of JPOs and their application as a quantum annealer.

In this paper, starting from the algorithm, a performance- and energy-efficient 3D structure or shape of the Tensor Processing Engine (TPE) for CNN acceleration is systematically searched and evaluated. An optimal accelerator's shape maximizes the number of concurrent MAC operations per clock cycle while minimizes the number of redundant operations. The proposed 3D vector-parallel TPE architecture with an optimal shape can be very efficiently used for considerable CNN acceleration. Due to implemented support of inter-block image data independency, it is possible to use multiple of such TPEs for the additional CNN acceleration. Moreover, it is shown that the proposed TPE can also be uniformly used for acceleration of the different CNN models such as VGG, ResNet, YOLO, and SSD. We also demonstrate that our theoretical efficiency analysis is matched with the result of a real implementation for an SSD model to which a state-of-the-art channel pruning technique is applied.

Pairing computations on elliptic curves with odd prime degrees are rarely studied as low efficiency. Recently, Clarisse, Duquesne and Sanders proposed two new curves with odd prime embedding degrees: BW13-P310 and BW19-P286, which are suitable for some special cryptographic schemes. In this paper, we propose efficient methods to compute the optimal ate pairing on this types of curves, instantiated by the BW13-P310 curve. We first extend the technique of lazy reduction into the finite field arithmetic. Then, we present a new method to execute Miller's algorithm. Compared with the standard Miller iteration formulas, the new ones provide a more efficient software implementation of pairing computations. At last, we also give a fast formula to perform the final exponentiation. Our implementation results indicate that it can be computed efficiently, while it is slower than that over the (BLS12-P446) curve at the same security level.

Previous studies on anomaly detection in videos have trained detectors in which reconstruction and prediction tasks are performed on normal data so that frames on which their task performance is low will be detected as anomalies during testing. This paper proposes a new approach that involves sorting video clips, by using a generative network structure. Our approach learns spatial contexts from appearances and temporal contexts from the order relationship of the frames. Experiments were conducted on four datasets, and we categorized the anomalous sequences by appearance and motion. Evaluations were conducted not only on each total dataset but also on each of the categories. Our method improved detection performance on both anomalies with different appearance and different motion from normality. Moreover, combining our approach with a prediction method produced improvements in precision at a high recall.