The detection of hardware trojans has been extensively studied in the past. In this article, we propose a side-channel analysis technique that uses a wrapper-based feature selection technique for hardware trojan detection. The whale optimization algorithm is modified to carefully extract the best feature subset. The aim of the proposed technique is multiobjective: improve the accuracy and minimize the number of features. The power consumption traces measured from AES-128 trojan circuits are used as features in this experiment. The stabilizing property of the feature selection method helps to bring a mutual trade-off between the precision and recall parameters thereby minimizing the number of false negatives. The proposed hardware trojan detection scheme produces a maximum of 10.3% improvement in accuracy and reduction up to a single feature by employing the modified whale optimization technique. Thus the evaluation results conducted on various trust-hub cryptographic benchmark circuits prove to be efficient from the existing state-of-art methods.

Automatic detection of prohibited items is vital in helping security staff be more efficient while improving the public safety index. However, prohibited item detection within X-ray security inspection images is limited by various factors, including the imbalance distribution of categories, diversity of prohibited item scales, and overlap between items. In this paper, we propose to leverage the Poisson blending algorithm with the Canny edge operator to alleviate the imbalance distribution of categories maximally in the X-ray images dataset. Based on this, we improve the cascade network to deal with the other two difficulties. To address the prohibited scale diversity problem, we propose the Re-BiFPN feature fusion method, which includes a coordinate attention atrous spatial pyramid pooling (CA-ASPP) module and a recursive connection. The CA-ASPP module can implicitly extract direction-aware and position-aware information from the feature map. The recursive connection feeds the CA-ASPP module processed multi-scale feature map to the bottom-up backbone layer for further multi-scale feature extraction. In addition, a Rep-CIoU loss function is designed to address the overlapping problem in X-ray images. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method can successfully identify ten types of prohibited items, such as Knives, Scissors, Pressure, etc. and achieves 83.4% of mAP, which is 3.8% superior to the original cascade network. Moreover, our method outperforms other mainstream methods by a significant margin.

In this paper, we consider distributed decision-making over directed time-varying multi-agent systems. We consider an adversarial bandit problem in which a group of agents chooses an option from among multiple arms to maximize the total reward. In the proposed method, each agent cooperatively searches for the optimal arm with the highest reward by a consensus-based distributed Exp3 policy. To this end, each agent exchanges the estimation of the reward of each arm and the weight for exploitation with the nearby agents on the network. To unify the explored information of arms, each agent mixes the estimation and the weight of the nearby agents with their own values by a consensus dynamics. Then, each agent updates the probability distribution of arms by combining the Hedge algorithm and the uniform search. We show that the sublinearity of a pseudo-regret can be achieved by appropriately setting the parameters of the distributed Exp3 policy.

Control of complex networks such as gene regulatory networks is one of the fundamental problems in control theory. A Boolean network (BN) is one of the mathematical models in complex networks, and represents the dynamic behavior by Boolean functions. In this paper, a solution method for the finite-time control problem of BNs is proposed using a BDD (binary decision diagram). In this problem, we find all combinations of the initial state and the control input sequence such that a certain control specification is satisfied. The use of BDDs enables us to solve this problem for BNs such that the conventional method cannot be applied. First, after the outline of BNs and BDDs is explained, the problem studied in this paper is given. Next, a solution method using BDDs is proposed. Finally, a numerical example on a 67-node BN is presented.

A PBN is well known as a mathematical model of complex network systems such as gene regulatory networks. In Boolean networks, interactions between nodes (e.g., genes) are modeled by Boolean functions. In PBNs, Boolean functions are switched probabilistically. In this paper, for a PBN, a simplified representation that is effective in analysis and control is proposed. First, after a polynomial representation of a PBN is briefly explained, a simplified representation is derived. Here, the steady-state value of the expected value of the state is focused, and is characterized by a minimum feedback vertex set of an interaction graph expressing interactions between nodes. Next, using this representation, input selection and stabilization are discussed. Finally, the proposed method is demonstrated by a biological example.

In cyber-physical systems (CPSs) that interact between physical and information components, there are many sensors that are connected through a communication network. In such cases, the reduction of communication costs is important. Event-triggered control that the control input is updated only when the measured value is widely changed is well known as one of the control methods of CPSs. In this paper, we propose a design method of output feedback controllers with decentralized event-triggering mechanisms, where the notion of uniformly ultimate boundedness is utilized as a control specification. Using this notion, we can guarantee that the state stays within a certain set containing the origin after a certain time, which depends on the initial state. As a result, the number of times that the event occurs can be decreased. First, the design problem is formulated. Next, this problem is reduced to a BMI (bilinear matrix inequality) optimization problem, which can be solved by solving multiple LMI (linear matrix inequality) optimization problems. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is presented by a numerical example.

Self-dithered digital delta-sigma modulators (DDSMs) are commonly used in fractional-N frequency synthesizers due to their ability to eliminate unwanted spurs from the synthesizer’s spectra without requiring additional hardware. However, when operating with a low-bit input, self-dithered DDSMs can still suffer from spurious tones at certain inputs. In this paper, we propose a self-dithered MASH 1-1-1-1 structure to mitigate the spur issue in the self-dithered MASH DDSMs. The proposed self-dithered MASH 1-1-1-1 suppresses the spurs with shaped dithering and achieves 4th order noise shaping.

A 150 GHz fundamental oscillator employing an inter-stage matching network based on a transmission line is presented in this letter. The proposed oscillator consists of a two-stage common-emitter amplifier loop, whose inter-stage connections are optimized to meet the oscillation condition. The oscillator is designed in a 130-nm SiGe BiCMOS process that offers fT and fMAX of 350 GHz and 450 GHz. According to simulation results, an output power of 3.17 dBm is achieved at 147.6 GHz with phase noise of -115 dBc/Hz at 10 MHz offset and figure-of-merit (FoM) of -180 dBc/Hz.

A wireless sensor terminal module of 5cc size (2.5 cm × 2.5 cm × 0.8 cm) that does not require a battery is proposed by integrating three kinds of circuit technologies. (i) a low-power sensor interface: an FM modulation type CMOS sensor interface circuit that can operate with a typical power consumption of 24.5 μW was fabricated by the 0.7-μm CMOS process technology. (ii) power supply to the sensor interface circuit: a wireless power transmission characteristic to a small-sized PCB spiral coil antenna was clarified and applied to the module. (iii) wireless sensing from the module: backscatter communication technology that modulates the signal from the base terminal equipment with sensor information and reflects it, which is used for the low-power sensing operation. The module fabricated includes a rectifier circuit with the PCB spiral coil antenna that receives wireless power transmitted from base terminal equipment by electromagnetic resonance coupling and converts it into DC power and a sensor interface circuit that operates using the power. The interface circuit modulates the received signal with the sensor information and reflects it back to the base terminal. The module could achieve 100 mm communication distance when 0.4 mW power is feeding to the sensor terminal.

L-type LC/CL matching circuits are well known for their simple analytical solutions and have been applied to many radio-frequency (RF) circuits. When actually constructing a circuit, parasitic elements are added to inductors and capacitors. Therefore, each L and C element has a self-resonant frequency, which affects the characteristics of the matching circuit. In this paper, the parallel parasitic capacitance to the inductor and the series parasitic inductor to the capacitance are taken up as parasitic elements, and the details of the effects of the self-resonant frequency of each element on the S11, voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) and S21 characteristics are reported. When a parasitic element is added, each characteristic basically tends to deteriorate as the self-resonant frequency decreases. However, as an interesting feature, we found that the combination of resonant frequencies determines the VSWR and passband characteristics, regardless of whether it is the inductor or the capacitor.

Wide deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) is inducing exponentially growing energy consumption. Traditional digital platforms are becoming difficult to fulfill such ever-growing demands on energy efficiency as well as computing latency, which necessitates the development of high efficiency analog hardware platforms for AI. Recently, optical and electrooptic hybrid computing is reactivated as a promising analog hardware alternative because it can accelerate the information processing in an energy-efficient way. Integrated photonic circuits offer such an analog hardware solution for implementing photonic AI and machine learning. For this purpose, we proposed a photonic analog of support vector machine and experimentally demonstrated low-latency and low-energy classification computing, which evidences the latency and energy advantages of optical analog computing over traditional digital computing. We also proposed an electrooptic Hopfield network for classifying and recognizing time-series data. This paper will review our work on implementing classification computing and Hopfield network by leveraging silicon photonic circuits.

Infrared and visible image fusion can combine the thermal radiation information and the textures to provide a high-quality fused image. In this letter, we propose a hybrid variational fusion model to achieve this end. Specifically, an ℓ0 term is adopted to preserve the highlighted targets with salient gradient variation in the infrared image, an ℓ1 term is used to suppress the noise in the fused image and an ℓ2 term is employed to keep the textures of the visible image. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed variational model and our results have more sharpen textures with less noise.

In this note, we consider the problem of finding a step-by-step transformation between two longest increasing subsequences in a sequence, namely LONGEST INCREASING SUBSEQUENCE RECONFIGURATION. We give a polynomial-time algorithm for deciding whether there is a reconfiguration sequence between two longest increasing subsequences in a sequence. This implies that INDEPENDENT SET RECONFIGURATION and TOKEN SLIDING are polynomial-time solvable on permutation graphs, provided that the input two independent sets are largest among all independent sets in the input graph. We also consider a special case, where the underlying permutation graph of an input sequence is bipartite. In this case, we give a polynomial-time algorithm for finding a shortest reconfiguration sequence (if it exists).

Providing students with useful feedback on faulty programs can effectively help students fix programs. Spectrum-Based Fault Location (SBFL), which is a widely studied and lightweight technique, can automatically generate a suspicious value of statement ranking to help users find potential faults in a program. However, the performance of SBFL on student programs is not satisfactory, to improve the accuracy of SBFL in student programs, we propose a novel Multi-Correct Programs based Fault Localization (MCPFL) approach. Specifically, We first collected the correct programs submitted by students on the OJ system according to the programming problem numbers and removed the highly similar correct programs based on code similarity, and then stored them together with the faulty program to be located to construct a set of programs. Afterward, we analyzed the suspiciousness of the term in the faulty program through the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF). Finally, we designed a formula to calculate the weight of suspiciousness for program statements based on the number of input variables in the statement and weighted it to the spectrum-based fault localization formula. To evaluate the effectiveness of MCPFL, we conducted empirical studies on six student program datasets collected in our OJ system, and the results showed that MCPFL can effectively improve the traditional SBFL methods. In particular, on the EXAM metric, our approach improves by an average of 27.51% on the Dstar formula.

A 1 millisecond (1-ms) vision system, which processes videos at 1000 frames per second (FPS) within 1 ms/frame delay, plays an increasingly important role in fields such as robotics and factory automation. Superpixel as one of the most extensively employed image oversegmentation methods is a crucial pre-processing step for reducing computations in various computer vision applications. Among the different superpixel methods, simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) has gained widespread adoption due to its simplicity, effectiveness, and computational efficiency. However, the iterative assignment and update steps in SLIC make it challenging to achieve high processing speed. To address this limitation and develop a SLIC superpixel segmentation system with a 1 ms delay, this paper proposes grid sample based temporal iteration. By leveraging the high frame rate of the input video, the proposed method distributes the iterations into the temporal domain, ensuring that the system's delay keeps within one frame. Additionally, grid sample information is added as initialization information to the obtained superpixel centers for enhancing the stability of superpixels. Furthermore, a selective label propagation based pipeline architecture is proposed for parallel computation of all the possibilities of label propagation. This eliminates data dependency between adjacent pixels and enables a fully pipelined system. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed superpixel segmentation system achieves boundary recall and under-segmentation error comparable to the original SLIC algorithm. When considering label consistency, the proposed system surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art superpixel segmentation methods. Moreover, in terms of hardware performance, the proposed system processes 1000 FPS images with 0.985 ms/frame delay.

In recent years, location-based technologies for ubiquitous environments have aimed to realize services tailored to each purpose based on information about an individual's current location. To establish such advanced location-based services, an estimation technology that can accurately recognize and predict the movements of people and objects is necessary. Although global positioning system (GPS) has already been used as a standard for outdoor positioning technology and many services have been realized, several techniques using conventional wireless sensors such as Wi-Fi, RFID, and Bluetooth have been considered for indoor positioning technology. However, conventional wireless indoor positioning is prone to the effects of noise, and the large range of estimated indoor locations makes it difficult to identify human activities precisely. We propose a method to mine user activity patterns from time-series data of user's locationss in an indoor environment using ultra-wideband (UWB) sensors. An UWB sensor is useful for indoor positioning due to its high noise immunity and measurement accuracy, however, to our knowledge, estimation and prediction of human indoor activities using UWB sensors have not yet been addressed. The proposed method consists of three steps: 1) obtaining time-series data of the user's location using a UWB sensor attached to the user, and then estimating the areas where the user has stayed; 2) associating each area of the user's stay with a nearby landmark of activity and assigning indoor activities; and 3) mining the user's activity patterns based on the user's indoor activities and their transitions. We conducted experiments to evaluate the proposed method by investigating the accuracy of estimating the user's area of stay using a UWB sensor and observing the results of activity pattern mining applied to actual laboratory members over 30-days. The results showed that the proposed method is superior to a comparison method, Time-based clustering algorithm, in estimating the stay areas precisely, and that it is possible to reveal the user's activity patterns appropriately in the actual environment.

Despite recent advancements in utilizing meta-learning for addressing the generalization challenges of graph neural networks (GNN), their performance in argumentation mining tasks, such as argument classifications, remains relatively limited. This is primarily due to the under-utilization of potential pattern knowledge intrinsic to argumentation structures. To address this issue, our study proposes a two-stage, pattern-based meta-GNN method in contrast to conventional pattern-free meta-GNN approaches. Initially, our method focuses on learning a high-level pattern representation to effectively capture the pattern knowledge within an argumentation structure and then predicts edge types. It then utilizes a meta-learning framework in the second stage, designed to train a meta-learner based on the predicted edge types. This feature allows for rapid generalization to novel argumentation graphs. Through experiments on real English discussion datasets spanning diverse topics, our results demonstrate that our proposed method substantially outperforms conventional pattern-free GNN approaches, signifying a significant stride forward in this domain.

Despite the increasing use of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) in online discussion environments, few studies explore the application of AI as a facilitator in forming problem-solving debates and influencing opinions in cross-venue scenarios, particularly in diverse and war-ravaged countries. This study aims to investigate the impact of AI on enhancing participant engagement and collaborative problem-solving in online-mediated discussion environments, especially in diverse and heterogeneous discussion settings, such as the five cities in Afghanistan. We seek to assess the extent to which AI participation in online conversations succeeds by examining the depth of discussions and participants' contributions, comparing discussions facilitated by AI with those not facilitated by AI across different venues. The results are discussed with respect to forming and changing opinions with and without AI-mediated communication. The findings indicate that the number of opinions generated in AI-facilitated discussions significantly differs from discussions without AI support. Additionally, statistical analyses reveal quantitative disparities in online discourse sentiments when conversational AI is present compared to when it is absent. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the role of AI-mediated discussions and offer several practical and social implications, paving the way for future developments and improvements.

This paper presents the design and implementation of an automated multi-phase facilitation agent based on LLM to realize inclusive facilitation and efficient use of a large language model (LLM) to facilitate realistic discussions. Large-scale discussion support systems have been studied and implemented very widely since they enable a lot of people to discuss remotely and within 24 hours and 7 days. Furthermore, automated facilitation artificial intelligence (AI) agents have been realized since they can efficiently facilitate large-scale discussions. For example, D-Agree is a large-scale discussion support system where an automated facilitation AI agent facilitates discussion among people. Since the current automated facilitation agent was designed following the structure of the issue-based information system (IBIS) and the IBIS-based agent has been proven that it has superior performance. However, there are several problems that need to be addressed with the IBIS-based agent. In this paper, we focus on the following three problems: 1) The IBIS-based agent was designed to only promote other participants' posts by replying to existing posts accordingly, lacking the consideration of different behaviours taken by participants with diverse characteristics, leading to a result that sometimes the discussion is not sufficient. 2) The facilitation messages generated by the IBIS-based agent were not natural enough, leading to consequences that the participants were not sufficiently promoted and the participants did not follow the flow to discuss a topic. 3) Since the IBIS-based agent is not combined with LLM, designing the control of LLM is necessary. Thus, to solve the problems mentioned above, the design of a phase-based facilitation framework is proposed in this paper. Specifically, we propose two significant designs: One is the design for a multi-phase facilitation agent created based on the framework to address problem 1); The other one is the design for the combination with LLM to address problem 2) and 3). Particularly, the language model called “GPT-3.5” is used for the combination by using corresponding APIs from OPENAI. Furthermore, we demonstrate the improvement of our facilitation agent framework by presenting the evaluations and a case study. Besides, we present the difference between our framework and LangChain which has generic features to utilize LLMs.

We study the device length and/or band characteristics examined by two coupling analysis methods for our proposed fiber-type polarization splitter (FPS) composed of single mode fiber and polarization maintaining fiber. The first method is based on the power transition characteristics of the coupled-mode theory (CMT), and the second, a more accurate analysis method, is based on improved fundamental mode excitation (IFME). The CMT and IFME were evaluated and investigated with respect to the device length and bandwidth characteristics of the FPS. In addition, the influence of the excitation point shift of the fundamental mode, which has not been almost researched so far, is also analysed by using IFME.