This paper describes logic and analog test schemes that improve the testability of a pixel-parallel fingerprint identification circuit. The pixel contains a processing circuit and a capacitive fingerprint sensor circuit. For the logic test, we propose a test method using a pseudo scan circuit to check the processing circuits of all pixels simultaneously. In the analog test, the sensor circuit employs dummy capacitance to mimic the state of a finger touching the chip. This enables an evaluation of the sensitivity of all sensor circuits on logical LSI tester without touching the chip with a finger. To check the effectiveness of the schemes, we applied them to a pixel array in a fingerprint identification LSI. The pseudo scan circuit achieved a 100% failure-detection rate for the processing circuit. The analog test determines that the sensitivities of the sensor circuit in all pixels are in the proper range. The results of the tests confirmed that the proposed schemes can completely detect defects in the circuits. Thus, the schemes will pave the way to logic and analog tests of chips integrating highly functional devices stacked on a LSI.

In this paper, we propose an intrablog-based informal communication encouraging system named "Attractiblog." It has been pointed out that daily informal communications at a shared public space play very important role in information sharing in an organization. However, in most cases, the communications are often mere chats. To make the communications more informative, it is necessary to feed some common and beneficial topics there. Attractiblog is a system that extracts some articles posted in an intrablog considering who are in the shared space, and show them on a large-sized display that is located in the space. Thus, Attractiblog attempts to seamlessly link on-line communications to off-line communications. We conducted user studies and confirmed that Attractiblog can achieve a natural correspondence between topics in face-to-face informal communications and issues related to the activities of an organization as given in its intrablog.

Since we can accumulate a large amount of data including useless information in recent years, it is important to investigate various extraction method of clusters from data including much noises. The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) has attracted attention for clustering nowadays. In this study, we propose a method of using plural SOMs (TSOM: Tentacled SOM) for effective data extraction. TSOM consists of two kinds of SOM whose features are different, namely, one self-organizes the area where input data are concentrated, and the other self-organizes the whole of the input space. Each SOM of TSOM can catch the information of other SOMs existing in its neighborhood and self-organizes with the competing and accommodating behaviors. We apply TSOM to data extraction from input data including much noise, and can confirm that TSOM successfully extracts only clusters even in the case that we do not know the number of clusters in advance.

In this paper, we have systematically investigated parasitic effects due to the gate and source-drain engineering in multi-gate transistors. The potential impact of high-K dielectrics on multi-gate MOSFETs (MuGFETs), such as FinFET, is evaluated through 2D and 3D device simulations over a wide range of proposed dielectric values. It is observed that introduction of high-K dielectrics will significantly degrade the short channel effects (SCEs), however a combination of oxide and high-K stack can effectively control this degradation. The degradation is mainly due to the increase in the internal fringe capacitance coupled with the decrease in gate-channel capacitance. From the circuit perspective, an optimum K value has been identified through mixed mode simulations. Further, as a part of this work, the importance of optimization of the shape of the spacer region is highlighted through full 3D simulations.

When a linearly polarized light is launched into a birefringent material, the output light is generally elliptically polarized. The ratio of the major and minor axes of the polarization ellipse varies depending on the angle between the polarization direction of the input light and the birefringent axis of the medium. The maximum ratio is determined only by the retardation due to the birefringence. Utilizing this phenomena, birefringence of a medium whose principal axis direction is unclear is measured with high precision by measuring the maximum extinction ratio for various input light polarization directions. Ambiguity in retardation associated with angular function solution is removed by measurement at two adjacent wavelengths. The measurement principle of the new method is confirmed by applying it to a quarter wave plate made of quartz. Birefringence of a 3 m long ribbon fiber as small as 10-7 is successfully measured.

In this letter, we present a modified printed folded λ/2 dipole antenna design for Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) applications in UHF band (470-862 MHz). The arms of dipole are meandered to yield an asymmetrical structure. Wideband operation is obtained by increasing dipole-area. The impedance matching of the dipole structure is obtained by inserting some slots on the dipole-arms. This antenna combines omni-directional radiation pattern and wide bandwidth in an easy-to-fabricate structure. The experimental results of the constructed prototype are presented.

In this paper, two new clustering algorithms are proposed for the data with some errors. In any of these algorithms, the error is interpreted as one of decision variables -- called "tolerance" -- of a certain optimization problem like the previously proposed algorithm, but the tolerance is determined based on the opposite criterion to its corresponding previously proposed one. Applying our each algorithm together with its corresponding previously proposed one, a reliability of the clustering result is discussed. Through some numerical experiments, the validity of this paper is discussed.

In this paper, we report the detailed investigation of novel printed disc monopole antennas for ultra-wideband (UWB) applications focusing on miniaturization of the disc radiator. First, the basic property was examined for the case of a circular disc with diameter of 50 mm, and it was found that the VSWR is less than 2 in the UWB band of 3.1-10.6 GHz when the feed gap length is between about -0.1 and 0.2 mm. Next, in order to reduce the size of the disc radiator, various dimensions of elliptical discs were investigated. It is shown that if the dimensions of the elliptical disc are chosen appropriately, a smaller disc size antenna can be achieved. To decrease the antenna size further, a triangular notch and an exponentially curved notch on the ground plane of the antenna were examined. It is observed that the use of the notched ground is very effective and that the diameter of the circular radiator can be reduced to 17 mm. The proposed antenna has an omnidirectional pattern in the x-y plane. The influence of the notch on the radiation pattern is very small. Details of the simulation results using the FDTD method and experimental results for the proposed antenna are presented and analyzed. These features are very attractive for UWB applications.

This paper examines seasonal change of the true water area of Lake "Sakata" by using Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (POLSAR) image analysis. The true water area includes not only the body of water but also the water area under emerged-plants and/or floating-leave plants in the lake. Statistical POLSAR image analysis is carried out for both X- and L-band data, based on the three-component scattering power decomposition method, where the decomposed components are surface scattering, double-bounce scattering and volume scattering components. From the results of the image analysis for the L-band POLSAR data acquired by Pi-SAR system, it is found that strong double-bounce scattering can be observed at the vicinity of the boundary region between water area and the surrounding emerged-plants area in early and middle summer. This phenomenon is an important factor for environmental monitoring. To verify the generating mechanism of the double-bounce scattering, the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) polarimetric scattering analysis is also executed for a simplified boundary model, which simulates the local boundary region around the lake and consists of lots of vertical thin dielectric pillars on a perfect electric conductor (PEC) plate or on a PEC and dielectric hybrid plate. Taking into account the polarimetric feature of the double-bounce scattering obtained by both the FDTD and POLSAR image analyses, one can distinguish the actual water area from the bush of the emerged-plants around the lake, even when the water area is concealed by emerged-plants and/or floating-leave plants. Consequently, it is found that by using the proposed approach, one can estimate the true water area seasonal change for the lake and the surrounding wetland.

This paper presents a lifting wavelet coding technique with permutation and coefficient modification processes for coding the structured geometry data of 3-D polygonal mesh model. One promising method for coding 3-D geometry data is based on the structure processing of a 3-D model on a triangle lattice plane, while maintaining connectivity. In the structuring process, each vertex may be assigned to several nodes on the triangular lattice plane. One of the nodes to which a vertex is assigned is selected as a representative node and the others are called expanded nodes. Only the geometry data of the vertices at the representative nodes are required for reconstructing the 3-D model. In this paper we apply a lifting wavelet transform with a permutation process for an expanded node at an even location in each decomposition step and the neighboring representative node. This scheme arranges more representative nodes into the lower frequency band. Also many representative nodes separated from the connective expanded nodes are made to adjoin each other in lower frequency bands, and the correlation between the representative nodes will be reduced by the following decomposition process. A process is added to use the modified coefficients obtained from the coefficients of the adjacent representative nodes instead of the original coefficients in the permutation process. This has the effect of restraining increases in the decomposed coefficients with larger magnitude. Some experiments in which the proposed scheme was applied to structured geometry data of a 3-D model with complex connectivity show that the proposed scheme gives better coding performance and the reconstructed models are more faithful to the original in comparison with the usual schemes.

Web services (WS, hereafter) paradigm has attained such a relevance in both the academic and the industry world that the vision of the Internet has evolved from being considered as a mere repository of data to become the underlying infrastructure on which organizations' strategic business operations are being deployed [1]. Security is a key aspect if WS are to be generally accepted and adopted. In fact, over the past years, the most important consortiums of the Internet, like IETF, W3C or OASIS, have produced a huge number of WS-based security standards. Despite this spectacular growth, a development process that facilitates the systematic integration of security into all subprocesses of WS-based software development life-cycle does not exist. Eventually, this process should guide WS-based software developers in the specification of WS-based security requirements, the design of WS-based security architectures, and the deployment of the most suitable WS security standards. In this article, we will briefly present a process of this type, named PWSSec (Process for Web Services Security), and the artifacts used during the elicitation activity, which belongs to the subprocess WSSecReq aimed at producing a WS-based security requirement specification.

Recommender System (RS) predicts user's ratings towards items, and then recommends highly-predicted items to user. In recent years, RS has been playing more and more important role in the agent research field. There have been a great deal of researches trying to apply agent technology to RS. Collaborative Filtering, one of the most widely used approach to predict user's ratings in Recommender System, predicts a user's rating towards an item by aggregating ratings given by users who have similar preference to that user. In existing approaches, user similarity is often computed on the whole set of items. However, because the number of items is often very large and so is the diversity among items, users who have similar preference in one category may have totally different judgement on items of another kind. In order to deal with this problem, we propose a method to cluster items, so that inside a cluster, similarity between users does not change significantly from item to item. After the item clustering phase, when predicting rating of a user towards an item, we only aggregate ratings of users who have similarity preference to that user inside the cluster of that item. Experiments evaluating our approach are carried out on the real dataset taken from MovieLens, a movies recommendation web site. Experiment results suggest that our approach can improve prediction accuracy compared to existing approaches.

In this paper, we propose an efficient method for rearranging the wavelet packet coefficients of an image to form hierarchical trees, by which the well known SPIHT algorithm can be applied. For images with textures, the high frequency wavelet coefficients are likely to become significant after several code passes of SPIHT, which degrades substantially the coding performance. As a result, the high frequency wavelet coefficients representing most of the high detail content of images need to be decomposed into wavelet packet coefficients for a further exploitation. The proposed rearrangement scheme has been applied to the highest frequency wavelet packet coefficients of images. Experimental results show that the performance of SPIHT can be improved, especially for fingerprint images.

We present a parallel multilevel fast multipole algorithm aimed at low cost parallel computers such as GRID computer environments and clusters of workstations. The algorithm is a scheduling algorithm where work packets are handled in a certain order to ensure minimal idle time of the processors and to avoid simultaneous bursts of communication between the processors. The algorithm is implemented on a method of moment discretization of a two-dimensional TM electromagnetic scattering problem. Examples of several optical devices with a size up to 28 500 wavelengths are presented.

In recent years, wireless communications systems such as wireless LAN, Bluetooth, etc. are being rapidly adopted. As the antennas used in wireless communications systems are usually installed in small mobile devices, it is demanded that the volume should be small. In our research, we focus our attention on flexible printed circuits (FPCs) to meet the miniaturization demand. In this paper, we introduce a planar inverted F antenna (PIFA) suitable for IEEE802.11b/g and Bluetooth. The antenna is made of FPC. We measured the radiation pattern of the antenna when the antenna is successively curved and folded, and it is clear that its radiation performance does not vary much when the antenna is deformed. We analyzed the antenna by using the moment method.

In this paper, a new method for clustering of players in order to analyze games in soccer videos is proposed. The proposed method classifies players who are closely related in terms of soccer tactics into one group. Considering soccer tactics, the players in one group are located near each other. For this reason, the Euclidean distance between the players is an effective measurement for the clustering of players. However, the distance is not sufficient to extract tactics-based groups. Therefore, we utilize a modified version of the community extraction method, which finds community structure by dividing a non-directed graph. The use of this method in addition to the distance enables accurate clustering of players.

This paper considers optical transport and packet networks and discusses the constraints and solutions in computation of traffic engineering paths. We categorize the constraints into prunable or non-prunable classes. The former involves a simple metric which can be applied for filtering to determine the path. The latter requires a methodic consideration of more complicated network element attributes. An example of this type of constraints is path loss in which the metric can be evaluated only on a path basis, as opposed to simply applying the metric to the link. Another form of non-prunable constraint requires adaptation and common vector operation. Examples are the switching type adaptation and wavelength continuity, respectively. We provide possible solutions to cases with different classes of constraints and address the problem of path computation in support of traffic engineering in multi-layer networks where a set of constrains are concurrently present. The solutions include the application of channel graph and common vector to support switching type adaptation and label continuity, respectively.

For a microstrip antenna (MSA) with a ring-shaped slot on formed on the ground plane, downsizing the microstrip patch and expanding the circularly polarized bandwidth have been achieved successfully. The dimensions of the patch are 6.8 mm7.4 mm and the minimum axial ratio (AR) of 0.6 dB is obtained at 6.1 GHz. In addition, its AR is less than 3 dB at the relative bandwidth of 3.5%. The bandwidth of the proposed MSA is twice that of conventional single-feeding circularly polarized MSAs; however, its size is only half that of conventional MSAs.

We survey traffic matrix models, whose elements represent the traffic demand between source-destination pair nodes. Modeling the traffic matrix is useful for multilayer Traffic Engineering (TE) in IP optical networks. Multilayer TE techniques make the network so designed flexible and reliable. This is because it allows reconfiguration of the virtual network topology (VNT), which consists of a set of several lower-layer (optical) paths and is provided to the higher layer, in response to fluctuations (diurnal) in traffic demand. It is, therefore, important to synthetically generate traffic matrices as close to the real ones as possible to maximize the performance of multilayer TE. We compare several models and clarify their applicability to VNT design and control. We find that it is difficult in practice to make an accurate traffic matrix with conventional schemes because of the high cost for data measurement and the complicated calculations involved. To overcome these problems, we newly introduce a simplified traffic matrix model that is practical; it well mirrors real networks. Next, this paper presents our developed server, the IP Optical TE server. It performs multilayer TE in IP optical networks. We evaluate the effectiveness of multilayer TE using our developed IP Optical server and the simplified traffic matrix. We confirm that multilayer TE offers significant CAPEX savings. Similarly, we demonstrate basic traffic control in IP optical networks, and confirm the dynamic control of the network and the feasibility of the IP Optical TE server.

The specification of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) involves the identification of a large number of entities and their relationships. This is a non-trivial task that requires managing different views of the system. Many problems concerning this issue originate in the presence of contradictory goals and tasks, inconsistencies, and unexpected behaviours. Such troublesome configurations should be detected and prevented during the development process in order to study alternative ways to cope with them. In this paper, we present methods and tools that support the management of contradictions during the analysis and design of MAS. Contradiction management in MAS has to consider both individual (i.e. agent) and social (i.e. organization) aspects, and their dynamics. Such issues have already been considered in social sciences, and more concretely in the Activity Theory, a social framework for the study of interactions in activity systems. Our approach applies knowledge from Activity Theory in MAS, especially its base of contradiction patterns. That requires a formalization of this social theory in order to be applicable in a software engineering context and its adaptation to agent-oriented methodologies. Then, it will be possible to check the occurrence of contradiction patterns in a MAS specification and provide solutions to those situations. This technique has been validated by implementing an assistant for the INGENIAS Development Kit and has been tested with several case studies. This paper shows part of one of these experiments for a web application.