Nowadays, computer systems are limited by the power and memory wall. As the Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) has dominated the power consumption in modern devices, developing power-saving approaches on DRAM has become more and more important. Among several techniques on different abstract levels, scheduling-based power management policies can be applied to existing memory controllers to reduce power consumption without causing severe performance degradation. Existing power-aware schedulers cluster memory requests into sets, so that the large portion of the DRAM can be switched into the power saving mode; however, only the target addresses are taken into consideration when clustering, while we observe the types (read or write) of requests can play an important role. In this paper, we propose two scheduling-based power management techniques on the DRAM controller: the inter-rank read-write aware clustering approach greatly reduces the active standby power, and the intra-rank read-write aware reordering approach mitigates the performance degradation. The simulation results show that the proposed techniques effectively reduce 75% DRAM power on average. Compared with the existing policy, the power reduction is 10% more on average with comparable or less performance degradation for the proposed techniques.

In this letter, we prove that the Kurosawa-Desmedt (KD) scheme [10], which belongs to the hybrid framework, is KDM-CCA secure w.r.t. an ensemble proposed by Qin et al. in [12] under the decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption. Since our proof does not rely on the random oracle model, we partially answer the question presented by Davies and Stam in [7], where they hope to achieve the KDM-CCA security for hybrid encryption scheme in the standard model (i.e. not random oracle model). Moreover, our result may also make sense in practice since KD-scheme is (almost) the most efficient CCA secure scheme.

This paper proposed patient friendly capsule endoscopy (CE) for not only screening but also treatment. Two different types of CEs with an Internet utility were investigated. The first type used magnetic navigation in the stomach and colon for screening. Magnetic navigation enabled the capsule to explore the whole of the gastrointestinal tract with less risk of missing lesions and complete the screening within the battery life. The system's design was patiently friendly as it allowed the subjects to leave the hospital after the capsule had been navigated in the stomach. The second investigated two different therapeutic robotic endoscopes. Both prototypes were driven by DC motors and controlled remotely via the internet. In addition, they were equipped with therapeutic tools and each prototype's ability with the tools was assessed. The investigation showed it was possible to remotely control both prototypes and operate therapeutic tools via the Internet. The investigation identified areas for improvement, such as size, connection speed, security of data, and the holding the capsule's position during treatment, In conclusion, both methods have the potential to make capsule endoscopy a very patient friendly procedure that can be carried out anywhere.

The ultimate purpose of a business process is to promote business values. Thus, any process that fails to enhance or promote business values should be improved or adjusted so that business values can be achieved. Therefore an organization should have the capability of confirming whether a business value is achieved; furthermore, in order to cope with the changes of business environment, it should be able to define the necessary measures on the basis of business values. This paper proposes techniques for measuring a business process based on business values, which can be used to monitor and control business activities focusing on the attainment of business values. To show the feasibility of the techniques, we compare their monitoring and controlling capabilities with those of the current fulfillment process of a company. The results show that the proposed techniques are effective in linking business values to relevant processes and integrating each measurement result in accordance with the management level.

For robust visual tracking, the main challenges of a subspace representation model can be attributed to the difficulty in handling various appearances of the target object. Traditional subspace learning tracking algorithms neglected the discriminative correlation between different multi-view target samples and the effectiveness of sparse subspace learning. For learning a better subspace representation model, we designed a discriminative graph to model both the labeled target samples with various appearances and the updated foreground and background samples, which are selected using an incremental updating scheme. The proposed discriminative graph structure not only can explicitly capture multi-modal intraclass correlations within labeled samples but also can obtain a balance between within-class local manifold and global discriminative information from foreground and background samples. Based on the discriminative graph, we achieved a sparse embedding by using L2,1-norm, which is incorporated to select relevant features and learn transformation in a unified framework. In a tracking procedure, the subspace learning is embedded into a Bayesian inference framework using compound motion estimation and a discriminative observation model, which significantly makes localization effective and accurate. Experiments on several videos have demonstrated that the proposed algorithm is robust for dealing with various appearances, especially in dynamically changing and clutter situations, and has better performance than alternatives reported in the recent literature.

This paper considers the problem of enumerating all maximal cliques in unit disk graphs, which is a plausible setting for applications of finding similar data groups. Our primary interest is to develop a faster algorithm using the geometric structure about the metric space where the input unit disk graph is embedded. Assuming that the distance between any two vertices is available, we propose a new algorithm based on two well-known algorithms called Bron-Kerbosch and Tomita-Tanaka-Takahashi. The key idea of our algorithm is to find a good pivot quickly using geometric proximity. We validate the practical impact of our algorithm via experimental evaluations.

In retinal blood vessel extraction through background removal, the vessels in a fundus image which appear in a higher illumination variance area are often missing after the background is removed. This is because the intensity values of the vessel and the background are nearly the same. Thus, the estimated background should be robust to changes of the illumination intensity. This paper proposes retinal blood vessel extraction using background estimation. The estimated background is calculated by using a weight surface fitting method with a high degree polynomial. Bright pixels are defined as unwanted data and are set as zero in a weight matrix. To fit a retinal surface with a higher degree polynomial, fundus images are reduced in size by different scaling parameters in order to reduce the processing time and complexity in calculation. The estimated background is then removed from the original image. The candidate vessel pixels are extracted from the image by using the local threshold values. To identify the true vessel region, the candidate vessel pixels are dilated from the candidate. After that, the active contour without edge method is applied. The experimental results show that the efficiency of the proposed method is higher than the conventional low-pass filter and the conventional surface fitting method. Moreover, rescaling an image down using the scaling parameter at 0.25 before background estimation provides as good a result as a non-rescaled image does. The correlation value between the non-rescaled image and the rescaled image is 0.99. The results of the proposed method in the sensitivity, the specificity, the accuracy, the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) and the processing time per image are 0.7994, 0.9717, 0.9543, 0.9676 and 1.8320 seconds for the DRIVE database respectively.

In a proxy re-signatures (PRS) scheme, a semi-trusted proxy is given some information which allows it to translate a user i's signature on a message m into another user j's signature on the same message m. However, the proxy cannot, on it own, compute signatures for either i or j. This notion introduced by Blaze et a. at EUROCRYPT 1998, and then revisited by Ateniese and Hohenberger at CCS 2005. The existence of multi-use unidirectional PRS scheme is an open problem left by AH05. Whereafter, at CCS 2008, Libert and Vergnaud constructed the first multi-use unidirectional PRS scheme. However, there is a major drawback in the LV08 scheme that the size of the signatures is linear in the number of translations. Hence, Libert and Vergnaud said that a more challenging task would be to find out implementations of such primitives where the size of signatures and the verification cost do not grow linearly with the number of translations. In this work we resolve this task by constructing a such PRS scheme in the standard model by using indistinguishability obfuscation. A shortcoming of our construction is that the security is selective but not full.

This paper deals with a problem where a robot identifies an object that a human asks it to bring by voice when there is a set of objects that the human and the robot can see. When the robot knows the requested object, it must identify the object and when it does not know the object, it must say it does not. This paper presents a new method for discriminating unknown objects from known objects using object images and human speech. It uses a confidence measure that integrates image recognition confidences and speech recognition confidences based on logistic regression.

A four-pixel-array superconducting transition-edge sensor (TES) microcalorimeter with a mushroom-shaped absorber was fabricated for the energy dispersive spectroscopy performed on a transmission electron microscope. The TES consists of a bilayer of Au/Ti with either a 50-nm or 120-nm thickness. The absorber of 5.0,$mu$m thick is made from a Au layer and its stem is deposited in the center of the TES surface. A Ta$_{2}$O$_{5}$ insulating layer of 100-nm thickness is inserted between the overhang region of the absorber and the TES surface. A selected pixel of the TES microcalorimeter was operated for the detection of Np L X-rays emitted from an $^{241}$Am source. A response of the TES microcalorimeter to L X-rays was obtained by analyzing detection signal pulses with using the optimal filter method. An energy resolution was obtained to be 33,eV of the full width at half maximum value at 17.751,keV of Np L$_{eta 1}$ considering its natural width of 13.4,eV. Response to L X-rays emitted from a mixture source of $^{238}$Pu, $^{239}$Pu and $^{241}$Am was obtained by operating the selected pixel of the TES microcalorimeter. Major L X-ray peaks of progeny elements of $alpha$ decay of Pu and Am isotopes were clearly identified in the obtained energy spectrum. The experimental results demonstrated the separation of $^{241}$Am and plutonium isotopes by L X-ray spectroscopy.

Since the birth of astrophysics, astronomers have been using free-space optics to analyze light falling on Earth. In the future however, thanks to the advances in photonics and nanoscience/nanotechnology, much of the manipulation of light might be carried out using not optics but confined waveguides, or circuits, on a chip. This new generation of instruments will be not only extremely compact, but also powerful in performance because the integration enables a greater degree of multiplexing. The benefit is especially profound for space- or air-borne observatories, where size, weight, and mechanical reliability are of top priority. Recently, several groups around the world are trying to integrate ultra-wideband (UWB), low-resolution spectrometers for millimeter-submillimeter waves onto microchips, using superconducting microelectronics. The scope of this Paper is to provide a general introduction and a review of the state-of-the-art of this rapidly advancing field.

This paper develops the double generating function method for the discrete-time linear quadratic optimal control problem. This method can give generators for optimal solutions only in terms of pre-computed coefficients and boundary conditions, which is useful for the on-line repetitive computation for different boundary conditions. Moreover, since each generator contains inverse terms, the invertibility analysis is also performed to conclude that the terms in the generators constructed by double generating functions with opposite time directions are invertible under some mild conditions, while the terms with the same time directions will become singular when the time goes infinity which may cause instability in numerical computations. Examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed method.

With the rise of component-based software development, its reliability has attracted much attention from both academic and industry communities. Component-based software development focuses on architecture design, and thus it is important for reliability analysis to emphasize software architecture. Existing approaches to architecture-based software reliability analysis don't model the usage profile explicitly, and they ignore the difference between the testing profile and the practical profile of components, which limits their applicability and accuracy. In response to these issues, a new reliability modeling and prediction approach is introduced. The approach considers reliability-related architecture factors by explicitly modeling the system usage profile, and transforms the testing profile into the practical usage profile of components by representing the profile with input sub-domains. Finally, the evaluation experiment shows the potential of the approach.

Introducing pronunciation models into decoding has been proven to be benefit to LVCSR. In this paper, a discriminative pronunciation modeling method is presented, within the framework of the Minimum Phone Error (MPE) training for HMM/GMM. In order to bring the pronunciation models into the MPE training, the auxiliary function is rewritten at word level and decomposes into two parts. One is for co-training the acoustic models, and the other is for discriminatively training the pronunciation models. On Mandarin conversational telephone speech recognition task, compared to the baseline using a canonical lexicon, the discriminative pronunciation models reduced the absolute Character Error Rate (CER) by 0.7% on LDC test set, and with the acoustic model co-training, 0.8% additional CER decrease had been achieved.

Recently, a next-generation heterodyne mixer detector---a hot electron bolometer (HEB) mixer employing a superconducting microbridge---has gradually opened up terahertz-band astronomy. The surrounding state-of-the-art technologies including fabrication processes, 4 K cryostats, cryogenic low-noise amplifiers, local oscillator sources, micromachining techniques, and spectrometers, as well as the HEB mixers, have played a valuable role in the development of super-low-noise heterodyne spectroscopy systems for the terahertz band. The current developmental status of terahertz-band HEB mixer receivers and their applications for spectroscopy and astronomy with ground-based, airborne, and satellite telescopes are presented.

To immobilize cytochrome $c$ (cyt.,$c$) on ITO electrode with keeping its direct electron transfer (DET) activity, 10-carboxydecylphosphonic acid (10-CDPA) self-assembled monolayer (SAM) film was formed on ITO electrode. After 100 times washing process with exchanging phosphate buffer saline solution in the cell to fresh one, extit{in situ} slab optical waveguide (SOWG) absorption spectral measurement proved that about 80% of cyt.,$c$ immobilized on 10-CDPA modified ITO electrode was adsorbed on ITO electrode. Additionally SOWG spectral change of cyt.,$c$ between oxidized and reduced forms was observed with setting the ITO electrode potential at 0.3 and $-$0.3,V vs. Ag/AgCl, respectively showing DET reaction between cyt.,$c$ and ITO electrode occurred. About 30% of a monolayer coverage was estimated from the coulomb amount in the surface area of oxidation and reduction peaks on cyclic voltammetry (CV) data. CV peak current maintained 84% for ITO electrode modified with 10-CDPA SAM film after 60,min continuous scan with 0.1,V/sec from 0.3 and $-$0.3,V vs. Ag/AgCl.

The high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard has significantly improved compression performance for many applications, including remote desktop and desktop sharing. Screen content video coding is widely used in applications with a high demand for real-time performance. HEVC usually introduces great computational complexity, which makes fast algorithms necessary to offset the limited computing power of HEVC encoders. In this study, a statistical analysis of several screen content sequences is first performed to better account for the completely different statistics of natural images and videos. Second, a fast coding unit (CU) splitting method is proposed, which aims to reduce HEVC intra coding computational complexity, especially in screen content coding. In the proposed scheme, CU size decision is made by checking the smoothness of the luminance values in every coding tree unit. Experiments demonstrate that in HEVC range extension standard, the proposed scheme can save an average of 29% computational complexity with 0.9% Bjøntegaard Delta rate (BD-rate) increase compared with HM13.0+RExt6.0 anchor for screen content sequences. For default HEVC, the proposed scheme can reduce encoding time by an average of 38% with negligible loss of coding efficiency.

A serial ATA PHY fabricated in a 0.15-µm CMOS process performs the serial ATA operation in an asynchronous transition by using large variation in the reference clock. This technique calibrates a transmission signal frequency by utilizing the received signal. This is achieved by calibrating the divide ratio of a spread-spectrum clock generator (SSCG). This technique enables a serial ATA PHY to use reference oscillators with a production-frequency tolerance of less than 400ppm, i.e., higher than the permissible TX frequency variations (i.e., 350ppm). The calibrated transmission signal achieved a total jitter of 3.9ps.

Least squares error (LSE) method adopted recursively can be used to track the frequency and amplitude of signals in steady states and kinds of non-steady ones in power system. Taylor expansion is used to give another version of this recursive LSE method. Aided by variable-windowed short-time discrete Fourier transform, recursive LSEs with and without Taylor expansion converge faster than the original ones in the circumstance of off-nominal input singles. Different versions of recursive LSE were analyzed under various states, such as signals of off-nominal frequency with harmonics, signals with step changes, signals modulated by a sine signal, signals with decaying DC offset and additive Gaussian white noise. Sampling rate and data window size are two main factors influencing the performance of method recursive LSE in transient states. Recursive LSE is sensitive to step changes of signals, but it is in-sensitive to signals' modulation and singles with decaying DC offset and noise.

We have investigated both the film thickness and surface potential of organic semiconductors deposited on two kinds of electrodes by the simultaneous observation with the dynamic force microscopy (DFM)/Kelvin-probe force microscope (KFM). To clarify the interfacial properties of organic semiconductor, we fabricated samples that imitated the organic light emitting diode (OLED) structure by depositing bis [$N,N '$-(1-naphthyl)-$N,N '$-phenyl] benzidine ($alpha$-NPD) and tris (8-hydroxyquinolinato) aluminum (Alq$_{3}$), respectively, on indium-tin-oxide (ITO) as anode and aluminum (Al) as cathode by the vacuum evaporation deposition using intersecting metal shadow masks. This deposition technique enables us to fabricate four different areas in the same substrate. The crossover area of the deposited thin films were measured by the DFM/KFM, the energy band diagrams were depicted and we considered that the charge behavior of the organic semiconductor depended on the material and the structure.