This paper investigates the problem of nonpreemptively scheduling independent parallel tasks in an environment with multiple machines, which is motivated from the recent studies in scheduling tasks in a multi-machine environment. In this scheduling environment, each machine contains a number of identical processors and each parallel task can simultaneously require a number of processors for its processing in any single machine. Whenever tasks are processed in parallel in a parallel machine, message communication among processors is often inevitable. The problem of finding a shortest schedule length on scheduling independent parallel tasks with the consideration of communication overhead in a multi-machine environment is NP-hard. The aim of this paper is to propose a heuristic algorithm for this kind of problem and to analyze the performance bound of this heuristic algorithm.

Rapid advances in semiconductor manufacturing technology have led to higher chip power densities, which places greater emphasis on packaging and temperature control during testing. For system-on-chips, peak power-based scheduling algorithms have been used to optimize tests under specified power constraints. However, imposing power constraints does not always solve the problem of overheating due to the non-uniform distribution of power across the chip. This paper presents a TAM/Wrapper co-design methodology for system-on-chips that ensures thermal safety while still optimizing the test schedule. The method combines a simplified thermal-cost model with a traditional bin-packing algorithm to minimize test time while satisfying temperature constraints. Furthermore, for temperature checking, thermal simulation is done using cycle-accurate power profiles for more realistic results. Experiments show that even a minimal sacrifice in test time can yield a considerable decrease in test temperature as well as the possibility of further lowering temperatures beyond those achieved using traditional power-based test scheduling.

In a network with capacity h for multicast, information Xh=(X1, X2, , Xh) can be transmitted from a source node to sink nodes without error by a linear network code. Furthermore, secret information Sr=(S1, S2, , Sr) can be transmitted securely against wiretappers by k-secure network coding for k h-r. In this case, no information of the secret leaks out even if an adversary wiretaps k edges, i.e. channels. However, if an adversary wiretaps k+1 edges, some Si may leak out explicitly. In this paper, we propose strongly k-secure network coding based on strongly secure ramp secret sharing schemes. In this coding, no information leaks out for every (Si1, Si2, ,Sir-j) even if an adversary wiretaps k+j channels. We also give an algorithm to construct a strongly k-secure network code directly and a transform to convert a nonsecure network code to a strongly k-secure network code. Furthermore, some sufficient conditions of alphabet size to realize the strongly k-secure network coding are derived for the case of k < h-r.

Two-dimensional resonant optical scanners actuated by vertical electrostatic combs with a unique electrical isolation structure have been developed. The isolation on the movable frame surrounding 1 mm-diameter gimbal mirror is made by trenching the top silicon layer of an SOI wafer with leaving the thick bottom layers. Thanks to the large mass of the frame, the resonant frequencies range in 65.0-89.2 Hz for the frame and in 11.9-36.8 kHz for the mirror in a 4 mm4 mm chip. The resultant frequency ratio of the fast/slow axes reaches over 500 and such a high frequency ratio is utilized to display QVGA image by raster scanning of a laser beam.

The information technology revolution has transformed all aspects of our society including critical infrastructures and led a significant shift from their old and disparate business models based on proprietary and legacy environments to more open and consolidated ones. Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems have been widely used not only for industrial processes but also for some experimental facilities. Due to the nature of open environments, managing SCADA systems should meet various security requirements since system administrators need to deal with a large number of entities and functions involved in critical infrastructures. In this paper, we identify necessary access control requirements in SCADA systems and articulate access control policies for the simulated SCADA systems. We also attempt to analyze and realize those requirements and policies in the context of role-based access control that is suitable for simplifying administrative tasks in large scale enterprises.

Under the assumption that the clock can be inputted to each register at an arbitrary timing, the minimum feasible clock period might be reduced by register relocation while maintaining the circuit behavior and topology. However, if the minimum feasible clock period is reduced, then the number of registers tends to be increased. In this paper, we propose a gate-level register relocation method that reduces the number of registers while keeping the target clock period. In experiments, the proposed method reduces the number of registers in the practical time in most circuits.

Point Pattern Matching (PPM) is an essential problem in many image analysis and computer vision tasks. This paper presents a two-stage algorithm for PPM problem using ellipse fitting and dual Hilbert scans. In the first matching stage, transformation parameters are coarsely estimated by using four node points of ellipses which are fitted by Weighted Least Square Fitting (WLSF). Then, Hilbert scans are used in two aspects of the second matching stage: it is applied to the similarity measure and it is also used for search space reduction. The similarity measure named Hilbert Scanning Distance (HSD) can be computed fast by converting the 2-D coordinates of 2-D points into 1-D space information using Hilbert scan. On the other hand, the N-D search space can be converted to a 1-D search space sequence by N-D Hilbert Scan and an efficient search strategy is proposed on the 1-D search space sequence. In the experiments, we use both simulated point set data and real fingerprint images to evaluate the performance of our algorithm, and our algorithm gives satisfying results both in accuracy and efficiency.

This letter addresses the problem of robust transceiver design for the multiuser multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) downlink where the channel state information at the base station (BS) is imperfect. A stochastic approach which minimizes the expectation of the total mean square error (MSE) of the downlink conditioned on the channel estimates under a total transmit power constraint is adopted. The iterative algorithm reported in [2] is improved to handle the proposed robust optimization problem. Simulation results show that our proposed robust scheme effectively reduces the performance loss due to channel uncertainties and outperforms existing methods, especially when the channel errors of the users are different.

Data compression is popularly applied to computer systems and communication systems in order to reduce storage size and communication time, respectively. Since large data are used frequently, string matching for such data takes a long time. If the data are compressed, the time gets much longer because decompression is necessary. Long string matching time makes computer virus scan time longer and gives serious influence to the security of data. From this, CPM (Compression Pattern Matching) methods for several compression methods have been proposed. This paper proposes CPM method for PPM which achieves fast virus scan and improves dependability of the compressed data, where PPM is based on a Markov model, uses a context information, and achieves a better compression ratio than BW transform and Ziv-Lempel coding. The proposed method encodes the context information, which is generated in the compression process, and appends the encoded data at the beginning of the compressed data as a header. The proposed method uses only the header information. Computer simulation says that augmentation of the compression ratio is less than 5 percent if the order of the PPM is less than 5 and the source file size is more than 1 M bytes, where order is the maximum length of the context used in PPM compression. String matching time is independent of the source file size and is very short, less than 0.3 micro seconds in the PC used for the simulation.

This paper presents a text-independent speaker verification method using Gaussian mixture models (GMMs), where only utterances of enrolled speakers are required. Artificial cohorts are used instead of those from speaker databases, and GMMs for artificial cohorts are generated by changing model parameters of the GMM for a claimed speaker. Equal error rates by the proposed method are about 60% less than those by a conventional method which also uses only utterances of enrolled speakers.

This paper presents an improved min-sum iterative decoding scheme for regular and irregular LDPC codes. The proposed decoding scheme scales the extrinsic soft information from variable nodes to check. Different scaling factors are applied for iterations and the scaling factors are obtained by a simplified vector optimization method.

This letter proposes an efficient uplink scheduling algorithm for the voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) service with variable frame-duration according to the voice activity in IEEE 802.16e/m systems. The proposed algorithm dynamically changes the grant-interval to save the uplink bandwidth, and it uses the random access scheme when the voice activity changes from silent-period to talk-spurt. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm can increase the VoIP capacity by 26 percent compared to the conventional extended real-time polling service (ertPS).

An indirectly reactive sputtering coater has been developed to deposit various high quality metallic and metal oxide films at high deposition rate. In this letter, several kinds of filters such as antireflection (AR) coating, IR-cut filter, and Rugate filter were deposited for the benchmark test of implemental capabilities. Our coater was established to be a powerful tool for both discrete multilayer and Rugate filters due to high stability and reproducibility of the refractive index and the deposition rate.

We propose two multiple assignment secret sharing schemes realizing general access structures. One is always more efficient than the secret sharing scheme proposed by Ito, Saito and Nishizeki [5] from the viewpoint of the number of shares distributed to each participant. The other is also always more efficient than the scheme I of [7].

A simple model of inductor-coupled bistable oscillators is shown to exhibit pulse wave propagation. We demonstrate numerically that there exists a pulse wave which propagates with a constant speed in comparatively wide parameter region. In particular, the propagating pulse wave can be observed in non-uniform lattice with noise. The propagating pulse wave can be observed for comparatively strong coupling case, and for weak coupling case no propagating pulse wave can be observed (propagation failure). We also demonstrate various interaction phenomena between two pulses.

This paper proposes a novel MP3 watermarking method which is applicable to a mobile terminal with limited computational resources. Considering that in most cases the embedded information is copyright information or metadata, which should be extracted before playing back audio contents, the watermark detection process should be executed at high speed. However, when conventional methods are used with a mobile terminal, it takes a considerable amount of time to detect a digital watermark. This paper focuses on scalefactor manipulation to enable high speed watermark embedding/detection for MP3 audio and also proposes the manipulation method which minimizes audio quality degradation adaptively. Evaluation tests showed that the proposed method is capable of embedding 3 bits/frame information without degrading audio quality and detecting it at very high speed. Finally, this paper describes application examples for authentication with a digital signature.

Contourlet transform (CT) is a new image representation method, which can efficiently represent contours and textures in images. However, CT is a kind of overcomplete transform with a redundancy factor of 4/3. If it is applied to image compression straightforwardly, the encoding bit-rate may increase to meet a given distortion. This fact baffles the coding community to develop CT-based image compression techniques with satisfactory performance. In this paper, we analyze the distribution of significant contourlet coefficients in different subbands and propose a new contourlet-based embedded image coding (CEIC) scheme on low bit-rate. The well-known wavelet-based embedded image coding (WEIC) algorithms such as EZW, SPIHT and SPECK can be easily integrated into the proposed scheme by constructing a virtual low frequency subband, modifying the coding framework of WEIC algorithms according to the structure of contourlet coefficients, and adopting a high-efficiency significant coefficient scanning scheme for CEIC scheme. The proposed CEIC scheme can provide an embedded bit-stream, which is desirable in heterogeneous networks. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve the better compression performance on low bit-rate. Furthermore, thanks to the contourlet adopted in the proposed scheme, more contours and textures in the coded images are preserved to ensure the superior subjective quality.

In this paper, we propose a new mask estimation method for the computational auditory scene analysis (CASA) of speech using two microphones. The proposed method is based on a hidden Markov model (HMM) in order to incorporate an observation that the mask information should be correlated over contiguous analysis frames. In other words, HMM is used to estimate the mask information represented as the interaural time difference (ITD) and the interaural level difference (ILD) of two channel signals, and the estimated mask information is finally employed in the separation of desired speech from noisy speech. To show the effectiveness of the proposed mask estimation, we then compare the performance of the proposed method with that of a Gaussian kernel-based estimation method in terms of the performance of speech recognition. As a result, the proposed HMM-based mask estimation method provided an average word error rate reduction of 61.4% when compared with the Gaussian kernel-based mask estimation method.

We propose here a fully Spice-oriented design algorithm of op-amps for attaining the maximum gains under low power consumptions and assigned slew-rates. Our optimization algorithm is based on a well-known steepest descent method combining with nonlinear programming. The algorithm is realized by equivalent RC circuits with ABMs (analog behavior models) of Spice. The gradient direction is decided by the analysis of sensitivity circuits. The optimum parameters can be found at the equilibrium point in the transient response of the RC circuit. Although the optimization time is much faster than the other design tools, the results might be rough because of the simple transistor models. If much better parameter values are required, they can be improved with Spice simulator and/or other tools.

In this letter, a decentralized scatternet formation algorithm called Bluelayer is proposed. First, Bluelayer uses a designated root to construct a tree-shaped subnet and propagates an integer variable k1 called counter limit as well as a constant k in its downstream direction to determine new roots. Then each new root asks its upstream master to start a return connection procedure to convert the tree-shaped subnet into a web-shaped subnet for its immediate upstream root. At the same time, each new root repeats the same procedure as the root to build its own subnet until the whole scatternet is formed. Simulation results show that Bluelayer achieves good network scalability and generates an efficient scatternet configuration for various sizes of Bluetooth ad hoc network.