In this paper, we propose an infrastructure-free precise positioning system by utilizing a variation of received radio broadcast signal strength against vehicle travel as fingerprints of road segments. Use of broadcast wave is considered advantageous in deployment cost and sample density that affects measurement reliability, compared to communication medium such as 802.11p-based V2X radio used in our previous paper. We also present preliminary experimental results that indicate potential of positioning at 20cm accuracy by using reception information of two FM radio channels broadcast from a station about 20km away from the test track

Biphase periodic sequences having elements +1 or -1 with the two-level autocorrelation function are desirable in communications and radars. However, in case of the biphase orthogonal periodic sequences, Turyn has conjectured that there exist only sequences with period 4, i.e., there exist the circulant Hadamard matrices for order 4 only. In this paper, it is described that the conjecture is proved to be true by means of the isomorphic mapping, the Chinese remainder theorem, the linear algebra, etc.

An encountered-type haptic interface generates touch sensation only when a user's hand “encounters” virtual objects. This paper presents an effective encountered-type haptic interface that enables rendering of surfaces with variable curvature. The key idea is to systematically bend a thin elastic plate so as to create a curved surface with desired curvature, which becomes a contacting end effector that follows the user's finger and becomes an interface a user can touch when needed. The pose of the curvature is controlled in a way that it corresponds to the curved surfaces of virtual objects and user's finger position. The idea is realized by attaching two commercial haptic interfaces to both edges of a thin acryl plate and squeezing the plate. This setup allows us to generate a cylindrical object with curvature up to 0.035 mm-1 and gives 3DOF position control and 1DOF rotational control of the curved surface. Achievable workspace and curvature range are analyzed, and the feasibility and physical performance are demonstrated through a visuo-haptic grabbing scenario. In addition, a psychophysical experiment shows perceptual competence of the proposed system.

To provide basic considerations for the realization of method for suppressing the EMI from differential-paired lines on flexible printed circuits (FPC), the characteristics of the SI performance and shielding effectiveness (SE) of shielded-flexible printed circuits for differential-signaling are investigated in this paper experimentally and by a numerical modeling. Firstly, transmission characteristics of TDR measurement and frequency response of |Sdd21| are discussed, from view point of signal integrity. Secondly, as the characteristics of the SE performance for EMI, frequency responses of magnetic field are investigated. Although placement of conductive shield near the paired-lines decreases characteristics impedance, |Sdd21| for the “with Cu 5.5 µm-thickness copper shield” is not deteriorated compared with “without shield” and sufficient SE performance for magnetic field can be established. But, thin-shield deteriorates SI as well as SE performances. The frequency response of |Sdd21| at higher frequencies for the “Ag 0.1 µm” case has the steep loss roll off. A reflection loss resulted from impedance-mismatching is not dominant factor of the losses. The dominant factor may be magnetic field leakage due to very thin-conductive shield.

Let Fq be a finite field of cardinality q, R=Fq[u]/=Fq+uFq+u2Fq+u3Fq (u4=0) which is a finite chain ring, and n be a positive integer satisfying gcd(q,n)=1. For any $delta,alphain mathbb{F}_{q}^{ imes}$, an explicit representation for all distinct (δ+αu2)-constacyclic codes over R of length n is given, and the dual code for each of these codes is determined. For the case of q=2m and δ=1, all self-dual (1+αu2)-constacyclic codes over R of odd length n are provided.

Shrinkage widely linear recursive least squares (SWL-RLS) and its improved version called structured shrinkage widely linear recursive least squares (SSWL-RLS) algorithms are proposed in this paper. By using the relationship between the noise-free a posterior and a priori error signals, the optimal forgetting factor can be obtained at each snapshot. In the implementation of algorithms, due to the a priori error signal known, we still need the information about the noise-free a priori error which can be estimated with a known formula. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed algorithms have faster convergence and better tracking capability than augmented RLS (A-RLS), augmented least mean square (A-LMS) and SWL-LMS algorithms.

We propose a novel single polarization photonic band gap fiber (SP-PBGF) with an anisotropic air hole lattice in the core. An SP-PBGF with an elliptical air hole lattice in the core recently proposed can easily realize SP guidance utilizing the large difference of cutoff frequency for the x- and y-polarized modes. In this paper, in order to achieve SP guidance based on the same principle of this PBGF, we utilize an anisotropic lattice of circular air holes instead of elliptical air holes to ease the fabrication difficulty. After investigating the influence of the structural parameters on SP guidance, it is numerically demonstrated that the designed SP-PBGF has 381 nm SP operating band.

Personal Wi-Fi Hotspot, the Wi-Fi tethering function, is widely deployed on mobile devices to allow other wireless clients to share Internet access via a broadband connection. Its advantages include no connection fee and support of non-3G/LTE devices. However, utilizing this function can rapidly deplete the battery power of the tethering device because both interface connections (3G/LTE and Wi-Fi) are always on. To address this problem, this paper proposes the Energy Management Mechanism for Wi-Fi Tethering Mode on Mobile Devices (EMWT). The mechanism is designed to effectively manage both interfaces by adjusting certain sleep durations according to the incoming traffic. Short, Long, and Deep sleep durations are introduced for saving energy. EMWT can also guarantee the packet delay bound by limiting the maximum sleep period. Five traffic rates, composed of very low, low, medium, high, and very high, are evaluated. NS-3 simulation results reveal that energy savings of up to 52.52% can be achieved with only a slight impact on system performance, in terms of end-to-end delay, throughput, and packet loss.

A parallel Aho-Corasick (AC) approach, named PAC-k, is proposed for string matching in deep packet inspection (DPI). The proposed approach adopts graphic processing units (GPUs) to perform the string matching in parallel for high throughput. In parallel string matching, the boundary detection problem happens when a pattern is matched across chunks. The PAC-k approach solves the boundary detection problem because the number of characters to be scanned by a thread can reach the longest pattern length. An input string is divided into multiple sub-chunks with k characters. By adopting the new starting position in each sub-chunk for the failure transition, the required number of threads is reduced by a factor of k. Therefore, the overhead of terminating and reassigning threads is also decreased. In order to avoid the unnecessary overlapped scanning with multiple threads, a checking procedure is proposed that decides whether a new starting position is in the sub-chunk. In the experiments with target patterns from Snort and realistic input strings from DEFCON, throughputs are enhanced greatly compared to those of previous AC-based string matching approaches.

Because wavelet transforms have the characteristic of decomposing signals that are similar to the human acoustic system, speech enhancement algorithms that are based on wavelet shrinkage are widely used. In this paper, we propose a new speech enhancement algorithm of hearing aids based on wavelet shrinkage. The algorithm has multi-band threshold value and a new wavelet shrinkage function for recursive noise reduction. We performed experiments using various types of authorized speech and noise signals, and our results show that the proposed algorithm achieves significantly better performances compared with other recently proposed speech enhancement algorithms using wavelet shrinkage.

As semiconductor technologies have advanced, the reliability problem caused by soft-errors is becoming one of the serious issues in LSIs. Moreover, multiple component errors due to single soft-errors also have become a serious problem. In this paper, we propose a method to synthesize multiple component soft-error tolerant application-specific datapaths via high-level synthesis. The novel feature of our method is speculative resource sharing between the retry parts and the secondary parts for time overhead mitigation. A scheduling algorithm using a special priority function to maximize speculative resource sharing is also an important feature of this study. Our approach can reduce the latency (schedule length) in many applications without deterioration of reliability and chip area compared with conventional datapaths without speculative resource sharing. We also found that our method is more effective when a computation algorithm possesses higher parallelism and a smaller number of resources is available.

The goal of software testing should go beyond simply finding defects. Ultimately, testing should be focused on increasing customer satisfaction. Defects that are detected in areas of the software that the customers are especially interested in can cause more customer dissatisfaction. If these defects accumulate, they can cause the software to be shunned in the marketplace. Therefore, it is important to focus on reducing defects in areas that customers consider valuable. This article proposes a value-driven V-model (V2 model) that deals with customer values and reflects them in the test design for increasing customer satisfaction and raising test efficiency.

In this letter, a novel robust adaptive beamforming algorithm is addressed to improve the robustness against steering vector random errors (SVREs), which eliminates the signal of interest (SOI) component from the sample covariance matrix (SCM), based on interference-plus-noise covariance matrix (IPNCM) reconstruction over annulus uncertainty sets. Firstly, several annulus uncertainty sets are used to constrain the steering vectors (SVs) of both interferences and the SOI. Additionally the IPNCM is reconstructed according to its definition by estimating each interference SV over its own annulus uncertainty set via the subspace projection algorithm. Meanwhile, the SOI SV is estimated as the prime eigenvector of the SOI covariance matrix term calculated over its own annulus uncertainty set. Finally, a novel robust beamformer is formulated based on the new IPNCM and the SOI SV, and it outperforms other existing reconstruction-based beamformers when the SVREs exist, especially in low input signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) cases, which is proved through the simulation results.

A novel rendering algorithm with a best-matching patch is proposed to address the noise artifacts associated with Monte Carlo renderings. First, in the sampling stage, the representative patch is selected through a modified patch shift procedure, which gathers homogeneous pixels together to stay clear of the edges. Second, each pixel is filtered over a discrete set of filters, where the range kernel is computed using the selected patches. The difference between the selected patch and the filtered value is used as the pixel error, and the single filter that returns the smallest estimated error is chosen. In the reconstruction stage, pixel colors are combined with features of depth, normal and texture to form a cross bilateral filter, which highly preserves scene details while effectively removing noise. Finally, a heuristic metric is calculated to allocate additional samples in difficult regions. Compared with state-of-the art methods, the proposed algorithm performs better both in visual image quality and numerical error.

This paper proposes a new design formula of coupling coefficient between antenna and resonator for an efficient design of filtering antennas consisting of an antenna and resonators. The filtering antenna can be designed by introducing a well-established filter design theory. For such a design approach, an external Q factor at input port, coupling coefficients, and a radiation Q factor of the antenna need to be evaluated. However, conventional design methods have a time-consuming procedure, since there are no effective techniques to evaluate the coupling coefficient between resonator and antenna. To solve the problem, we derive the new design formula using only amplitude property of input reflection responses obtained from a coupled structure of resonator and antenna. As an example, a third-order filtering antenna is synthesized, designed, and tested at 2.45 GHz, which numerically and experimentally validates the effectiveness of the derived equation.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have gained importance with a rapid growth in their applications during the past decades. There has also been a rise in the need for energy-efficient and scalable routing along with the data aggregation protocols for the large scale deployments of sensor networks. The traditional routing algorithms suffer from drawbacks such as the presence of one hop long distance data transmissions, very large or very small clusters within a network at the same moment, over-accumulated energy consumption within the cluster-heads (CHs) etc. The lifetime of WSNs is also decreased due to these drawbacks. To overcome them, we have proposed a new method for the Multi-Hop, Far-Zone and Load-Balancing Hierarchical-Based Routing Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Network (MFLHA). Various improvements have been brought forward by MFLHA. The first contribution of the proposed method is the existence of a large probability for the nodes with higher energy to become the CH through the introduction of the energy decision condition and energy-weighted factor within the electing threshold of the CH. Secondly, MFLHA forms a Far-Zone, which is defined as a locus where the sensors can reach the CH with an energy less than a threshold. Finally, the energy consumption by CHs is reduced by the introduction of a minimum energy cost method called the Multi-Hop Inter-Cluster routing algorithm. Our experimental results indicate that MFLHA has the ability to balance the network energy consumption effectively as well as extend the lifetime of the networks. The proposed method outperforms the competitors especially in the middle range distances.

Sentence similarity computation is an increasingly important task in applications of natural language processing such as information retrieval, machine translation, text summarization and so on. From the viewpoint of information theory, the essential attribute of natural language is that the carrier of information and the capacity of information can be measured by information content which is already successfully used for word similarity computation in simple ways. Existing sentence similarity methods don't emphasize the information contained by the sentence, and the complicated models they employ often need using empirical parameters or training parameters. This paper presents a fully unsupervised computational model of sentence semantic similarity. It is also a simply and straightforward model that neither needs any empirical parameter nor rely on other NLP tools. The method can obtain state-of-the-art experimental results which show that sentence similarity evaluated by the model is closer to human judgment than multiple competing baselines. The paper also tests the proposed model on the influence of external corpus, the performance of various sizes of the semantic net, and the relationship between efficiency and accuracy.

The present study investigated the performance of text-based explanation for a large number of learners in an online tutoring task guided by a Pedagogical Conversational Agent (PCA). In the study, a lexical network analysis that focused on the co-occurrence of keywords in learner's explanation text, which were used as dependent variables, was performed. This method was used to investigate how the variables, which consisted of expressions of emotion, embodied characteristics of the PCA, and personal characteristics of the learner, influenced the performance of the explanation text. The learners (participants) were students enrolled in a psychology class. The learners provided explanations to a PCA one-on-one as an after-school activity. In this activity, the PCA, portraying the role of a questioner, asked the learners to explain a key concept taught in their class. The students were randomly assigned one key term out of 30 and were asked to formulate explanations by answering different types of questions. The task consisted of 17 trials. More than 300 text-based explanation dialogues were collected from learners using a web-based explanation system, and the factors influencing learner performance were investigated. Machine learning results showed that during the explanation activity, the expressions used and the gender of the PCA influenced learner performance. Results showed that (1) learners performed better when a male PCA expressed negative emotions as opposed to when a female PCA expressed negative emotions, and (2) learners performed better when a female PCA expressed positive expressions as opposed to when a female PCA expressed negative expressions. This paper provides insight into capturing the behavior of humans performing online tasks, and it puts forward suggestions related to the design of an efficient online tutoring system using PCA.

Stability-featured dynamic multi-path routing (SDMR) based on the existing Traffic engineering eXplicit Control Protocol (TeXCP) is proposed and evaluated for traffic engineering in terrestrial networks. SDMR abandons the sophisticated stability maintenance mechanisms of TeXCP, whose load balancing scheme is also modified in the proposed mechanism. SDMR is proved to be able to converge to a unique equilibria state, which has been corroborated by the simulations.

A non-photorealistic rendering method creates oil-film-like images, expressed with colorful, smooth curves similar to the oil films generated on the surface of glass or water, from color photo images. The proposed method generates oil-film-like images through iterative processing between a bilateral infra-envelope filter and an unsharp mask. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, tests using a Lena image were performed, and visual assessment of oil-film-like images was conducted for changes in appearance as the parameter values of the proposed method were varied. As a result of tests, the optimal value of parameters was found for generating oil-film patterns.