A function approximation based on an orthonormal wave function expansion in a complex space is derived. Although a probability density function (PDF) cannot always be expanded in an orthogonal series in a real space because a PDF is a positive real function, the function approximation can approximate an arbitrary PDF with high accuracy. It is applied to an actor-critic method of reinforcement learning to derive an optimal policy expressed by an arbitrary PDF in a continuous-action continuous-state environment. A chaos control problem and a PDF approximation problem are solved using the actor-critic method with the function approximation, and it is shown that the function approximation can approximate a PDF well and that the actor-critic method with the function approximation exhibits high performance.

The main factor determining for both friction and contact resistance is the true contact area in the contact interface. Contact resistance depends on the size of the true contact area and contaminant films interposed between the contact areas of the interface. Moreover, friction force also depends on the true contact area. In particular, the formation of metallic junctions in the true contact area strongly effects the friction force. Therefore, since both electrical contact and friction force are related to the size of the true contact area, the contact resistance and friction force are considered to be interrelated through true contact areas. For electromechanical devices with sliding contacts such as connector and sliding switches, the contact resistance and friction are important characteristics. In order to obtain low contact resistance, contact load should be higher, but the friction force increases. These are opposite-side problems. In this study, as the contact resistance and friction occur in the same true contact area, the relationship between the contact resistance and friction was expressed in an equation. Moreover, this relationship was examined experimentally on a variety of contact surfaces under different surface conditions.

In the optimum design of contactors, it is important to analyze the dynamic behaviors. In this paper, it proposes a new computational approach for analyzing dynamic characteristic of the energy-saving and bouncing-reducing double-coil contactor. According to the contactor's unique characteristic that it has two transferable coils, the paper builds two different sets of equations. One describes the period before the transfer position, and the other describes the period after the transfer position. The equations deal with the electrical circuit, electromagnetic field that can be calculated by using 3-D finite element method and mechanical system considering the influence of friction. The validity of the proposed method is confirmed by experiment. Finally, the paper gives an optimum design for the transfer position of the two coils. The result of the optimum design reduces both of the first and the second bounces of the movable contact.

In modern CMOS digital design, the noise immunity has come to have an almost equal importance to the power consumption. In the last decade, many low power design schemes have been presented. However, no one can simply judge which one is the best from the noise immunity point of view. In this paper, we investigate the noise immunity of the static CMOS low power design schemes in terms of logic and delay errors caused by different kinds of noise existing in the static CMOS digital circuits. To fulfill the aims of the paper, first a model representing the different sources of noise in deep submicron design is presented. Then the model is applied to the most famous low power design schemes to find out the most robust one with regard to noise. Our results show the advantages of the dual threshold voltage scheme over other schemes from the noise immunity point of view. Moreover, it indicates that noise should be carefully taken into account when designing low power circuits; otherwise circuit performance would be unexpected. The study is carried out on three circuits; each is designed in five different schemes. The analysis is done using HSPICE, assuming 0.18 µm CMOS technology.

To provide basic considerations for the realization of methods for predicting the electromagnetic (EM) radiation from a printed circuit board (PCB) with plural signal traces driven in the even-mode, the characteristics of the EM radiation resulting from two signal traces on a PCB are investigated experimentally and by numerical modeling. First, the frequency responses of common-mode (CM) current and far-electric field as electromagnetic interference (EMI) are discussed. As the two traces are moved closer to the PCB edge, CM current and far-electric field increase. The frequency responses in the two signal trace case can be identified using insights gained from the single trace case. Second, to understand the details of the increase in CM current, the distribution of the current density on the ground plane is calculated and discussed. Although crosstalk ensues, the rule for PCB design is to keep two high-speed traces on the interior of the PCB whenever possible, from the point of view of EM radiation. Finally, an empirical formula to quantify the relationship between the positions of two traces and CM current is provided and discussed by comparing four different models. Results calculated with the empirical formula and finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) modeling are in good agreement, which indicates the empirical formula may be useful for developing EMI design guidelines.

The recognition vector of the decision-theoretic approach and that of cumulant-based classification are combined to compose a higher dimension hyperspace to get the benefits of both methods. The method proposed in this paper can cover more kinds of signals including signals with order higher than 4 in the AWGN channel even under low SNR values, i.e. those down to -5 dB. The composed vector is input into an RBF neural network to get more reasonable reference points. Eleven kinds of signals, say 2ASK, 4ASK, 8ASK, 2PSK, 4PSK, 8PSK, 2FSK 4FSK, 8FSK, 16QAM and 64QAM, are involved in the discussion.

The behavior of Bard-type pivoting algorithms for the linear complementarity problem with a P-matrix is represented by an orientation of a hypercube. We call it a PLCP-cube. In 1978, Stickney and Watson conjectured that such an orientation has no facet on which all even outdegree vertices appear. We prove that this conjecture is true for acyclic PLCP-cubes in dimension five.

To clarify the transmission characteristics and near magnetic field on the angle pattern for the parallel transmission lines, the authors investigate how influence the angled pattern on the transmission lines by experiment and calculation. The angled patterns on the transmission lines are straight, right angle and curve. It shows that the suppression of EMI radiation at the angled pattern on the parallel transmission lines of the magnetic head is essential. In addition, it is suggested that angle pattern might be one of cause for the signal distortion and specific EMI radiation at high frequency.

In this paper an analysis of component and system reliability for lattice systems is proposed when component failures are not statistically independent. We deal the case that the failure rate of a component depends on the number of the adjacent failed components. And we discuss the maintainability of the system when a failed component is replaced by a spare component. At first we discuss the approximated reliability of each component. Then we estimate the mean number of failed components. Furthermore, the system reliability is approximated by using the component reliability.

We have been investigating an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) based cellular system that is called "dynamic parameter controlled orthogonal frequency and time division multiple access (DPC-OF/TDMA)" for the development of beyond third generation (B3G) mobile communication systems. Moreover, we have already proposed a time alignment control (TAC) to compensate propagation delays that induce a multiple-access interference (MAI) in the uplink OFDMA. However, that TAC includes a large amount of computations. This means that it is quite difficult for the OFDMA systems to implement TAC into volume-limited hardware devices such as field programmable gate array (FPGA). Thus, we propose a new complexity-reduced TAC (CRTAC) in this paper. CRTAC can be implemented into such devices easily. In this paper, we show some computer simulation results, and then evaluate the error rate performances of DPC-OF/TDMA employing CRTAC. Moreover, we also show the benefit of the reasonable level of the implementation complexity made by CRTAC.

In this letter, a more exact analysis scheme for outage probability is proposed for uplink of direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) systems. In the previous works, the effect of call admission control (CAC) on signal to interference ratio (SIR) is considered to evaluate the performance of the outage probability for CDMA systems, however, the effect of CAC on system states is not accurately considered. In this letter, we first analyze the system states more exactly by taking the effect of CAC on CDMA system states into account. Then, the exact probability of the outage is derived according to the exact system states. The probability of the system states and the outage of the proposed approximation scheme are compared with the results of the traditional analysis schemes and the computer simulation. Compared with traditional analysis schemes, the numerical results of the proposed analysis scheme is more close to the computer simulation results.

It is known that any chordal graph can be uniquely decomposed into simplicial components. Based on this fact, it is shown that for a given chordal graph, its automorphism group can be computed in O((c!n)O(1)) time, where c denotes the maximum size of simplicial components and n denotes the number of nodes. It is also shown that isomorphism of those chordal graphs can be decided within the same time bound. From the viewpoint of polynomial-time computability, our result strictly strengthens the previous ones respecting the clique number.

To one double-breaker model, experimental investigation on blow open force was carried out. It demonstrates that the ratio between the emerging blow open force and arc power FB/ui decreases with the arcing time, the contact gap has less effect on FB/ui, and the characteristics of the blow open force are similar when the peak value of the short circuit current is beyond 4 kA. Then, according to the experimental data and conclusions, considering the influence of blow open force, the interruption process of molded case circuit breakers (MCCBs) was investigated. It demonstrates the blow open force has significant influence on interruption process and the proposed method is effective to evaluate new design of MCCBs.

This paper proposes a novel pre-FFT type OFDM adaptive array antenna called "Eigenvector Combining." The eigenvector combining array antenna is a realization of a post-FFT type OFDM adaptive array antenna through a pre-FFT signal processing, so it can achieve excellent performance with less computational complexity and shorter training symbols. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed eigenvector combining array antenna shows excellent bit error rate performance close to the lower bound just with 2 OFDM symbol-long training symbols.

In this paper, a method of detecting overlapping speech segments in meetings is proposed. It is known that the eigenvalue distribution of the spatial correlation matrix calculated from a multiple microphone input reflects information on the number and relative power of sound sources. However, in a reverberant sound field, the feature of the number of sources in the eigenvalue distribution is degraded by the room reverberation. In the Support Vector Machines approach, the eigenvalue distribution is classified into two classes (overlapping speech segments and single speech segments). In the Support Vector Regression approach, the relative power of sound sources is estimated by using the eigenvalue distribution, and overlapping speech segments are detected based on the estimated relative power. The salient feature of this approach is that the sensitivity of detecting overlapping speech segments can be controlled simply by changing the threshold value of the relative power. The proposed method was evaluated using recorded data of an actual meeting.

In this paper, we propose to employ a characteristic function based non-Gaussianity measure as a one-unit contrast function for independent component analysis. This non-Gaussianity measure is a weighted distance between the characteristic function of a random variable and a Gaussian characteristic function at some adequately chosen sample points. Independent component analysis of an observed random vector is performed by optimizing the above mentioned contrast function (for different units) using a fixed-point algorithm. Moreover, in order to obtain a better separation performance, we employ a mechanism to choose appropriate sample points from an initially selected sample vector. Finally, some computer simulations are presented to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this paper, we present an efficient downlink power control scheme, for wireless networks, based on two key ideas: (i) global-local fixed-point-approximation technique (GLOFPAT) and (ii) bottleneck removal criterion (BRC). The proposed scheme copes with all scenarios including infeasible case where no power allocation can provide all multiple accessing users with target quality of service (QoS). For feasible case, the GLOFPAT efficiently computes a desired power allocation which corresponds to the allocation achieved by conventional algorithms. For infeasible case, the GLOFPAT offers valuable information to detect bottleneck users, to be removed based on the BRC, which deteriorate overall QoS. The GLOFPAT is a mathematically-sound distributed algorithm approximating desired power allocation as a unique fixed-point of an isotone mapping. The unique fixed-point of the global mapping is iteratively computed by fixed-point-approximations of multiple distributed local mappings, which can be computed in parallel by base stations respectively. For proper detection of bottleneck users, complete analysis of the GLOFPAT is presented with aid of the Tarski's fixed-point theorem. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme converges faster than the conventional algorithm and successfully increases the number of happy users receiving target QoS.

In this paper, analysis and synthesis methods of emotional voice for man-machine natural interface is developed. First, the emotional voice (neutral, anger, sadness, joy, dislike) is analyzed using time-frequency representation of speech and similarity analysis. Then, based on the result of emotional analysis, a voice with neutral emotion is transformed to synthesize the particular emotional voice using time-frequency modifications. In the simulations, five types of emotion are analyzed using 50 samples of speech signals. The high average discrimination rate is achieved in the similarity analysis. Further, the synthesized emotional voice is subjectively evaluated. It is confirmed that the emotional voice is naturally generated by the proposed time-frequency based approach.

It was previously shown that the number of array elements must exceed the number of sources for multiple target direction of arrival (DOA) tracking. This is clearly not practical for code-division multiple access (CDMA) communications since the number of mobile users is very large. To overcome the restriction, adaptive angle tracking approaches employing the code-matched filters and parallel Kalman/H∞ algorithms are presented in this paper. The proposed approaches are applied to the base station of a mobile communication system. Different from Kalman prediction algorithm which minimize the squared tracking error, the adaptive H∞ filtering algorithm is a worst case optimization. It minimizes the effect of the worst disturbances (including modeling error of direction matrix models and array structure imperfection, process noise, and measurement noise). Hence, the difficult problem of tracking the crossing mobiles can be successfully handled by using the code-matched filters. Computer simulation is provided for illustrating the effectiveness of the adaptive angle tracking approaches.

Visual criteria for diagnosing liver diseases, such as cirrhosis, from ultrasound images can be assisted by computerized texture classification. This paper proposes a system applying a PNN (Pyramid Neural Network) for classifying the hepatic parenchymal diseases in ultrasonic B-scan texture. In this study, we propose a multifractal-dimensions method to select the patterns for the training set and the validation sets. A modified box-counting algorithm is used to calculate the dimensions of the B-scan images. FDWT (Fast Discrete Wavelet Transform) is applied for feature extraction during the preprocessing. The structure of the proposed neural network is testified by training and validation sets by cross-validation method. The performance of the proposed system and a system based on the conventional multilayer network architecture is compared. The results show that, compared with the conventional 3-layer neural network, the performance of the proposed pyramid neural network is improved by efficiently utilizing the lower layer of the neural network.