Two kinds of composite right/left-handed coaxial lines (CRLH CLs) are designed for an antenna element. The dispersion relations of the infinite periodic CRLH CLs are designed to occur -1st resonance at around 700 MHz, respectively. The designed CRLH CLs comprise a monopole and a choke structure for antenna elements. To verify the resonant modes and frequencies, the monopole structure, the choke structure, and the antenna element which is combined the monopole and the choke structures are simulated by eigenmode analysis. The resonant frequencies correspond to the dispersion relations. The monopole and the choke structures are applied to the coaxially fed antenna. The proposed antenna matches at 710 MHz and radiates. At the resonant frequency, the total length of the proposed antenna which is the length of the monopole structure plus the choke structure is 0.12 wavelength. The characteristics of the proposed antenna has been compared with that of the conventional coaxially fed monopole antenna without the choke structure and the sleeve antenna with the quarter-wavelength choke structure. The radiation pattern of the proposed antenna is omnidirectional, the total antenna efficiency is 0.73 at resonant frequencies, and leakage current is suppressed lesser than -10 dB at resonant frequency. The propose antenna is fabricated and measured. The measured |S11| characteristics, radiation patterns, and the total antenna efficiency are in good agreement with the simulated results.

The gap states of tetratetracontane (C44H90; TTC), which is a model oligomer of polyethylene, was examined by using high-sensitivity UV photoemission spectroscopy (HS-UPS). The high sensitivity enabled us to directly observe the weak gap states distributed in the HOMO-LUMO gap from the valence band top to 3.0 eV below the vacuum level. On the basis of the density-of-states derived from UPS results, the tribocharging nature of polyethylene was discussed in comparison with our previous result for nylon-6,6 film.

In order to provide an alternative solution of human machine interfaces, this paper proposed to recognize 10 human hand gestures regularly used in the consumer electronics controlling scenarios based on a three-dimensional radar array. This radar array was composed of three low cost 24GHz K-band Doppler CW (Continuous Wave) miniature I/Q (In-phase and Quadrature) transceiver sensors perpendicularly mounted to each other. Temporal and spectral analysis was performed to extract magnitude and phase features from six channels of I/Q signals. Two classifiers were proposed to implement the recognition. Firstly, a decision tree classifier performed a fast responsive recognition by using the supervised thresholds. To improve the recognition robustness, this paper further studied the recognition using a two layer CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) classifier with the frequency spectra as the inputs. Finally, the paper demonstrated the experiments and analysed the performances of the radar array respectively. Results showed that the proposed system could reach a high recognition accurate rate higher than 92%.

This paper proposes optimal beam patterns of analog beamforming for SU (Single User) massive MIMO (Multi-Input Multi-Output) transmission systems. For hybrid beamforming in SU massive MIMO systems, there are several design parameters such as beam patterns, the number of beams (streams), the shape of array antennas, and so on. In conventional hybrid beamforming, rectangular patch array antennas implemented on a planar surface with linear phase shift beam patterns have been used widely. However, it remains unclear whether existing configurations are optimal or not. Therefore, we propose a method using OBPB (Optimal Beam Projection Beamforming) for designing configuration parameters of the hybrid beamforming. By using the method, the optimal beam patterns are derived first, and are projected on the assumed surface to calculate the achievable number of streams and the resulting channel capacity. The results indicate OBPB with a spherical surface yields at least 3.5 times higher channel capacity than conventional configurations.

In this work, we report the in situ growth of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) for the improvement of a transmission surface plasmon resonance (T-SPR) sensor to detect human immunoglobulin G (IgG). Human IgG was immobilized on an activated self-assembled monolayer of 11-mercaptoundecanoic on a gold-coated grating substrate. The T-SPR system was also used to monitor the construction of sensor chips as well as the binding of IgG and anti-IgG conjugated with AuNPs. After specific adsorption with IgG, the T-SPR signal was further enhanced by the in situ growth of AuNPs bound with anti-IgG. Using AuNP conjugation and in situ growth of bound AuNPs, the sensitivity of the IgG immunosensor was improved by two orders of magnitude compared with that without conjugated AuNPs.

Finely textured structures on a silicon surface were fabricated to act as field emitters via simple sandblasting using fine Al2O3 particles. Tests confirmed that the finely nicked structures function well as efficient field emitters. The emission current obeys the Fowler-Nordheim relationship, with a low electric field threshold. The fluctuation of the emission current was inversely proportional to the square root of the average emission current, and the long-term drift of the emission current was about 1% per hour at the average emission current of 108µA in the pressure range of 10-5Pa, indicating that the emitter offers a stable current output.

The technique of lossless compression via substring enumeration (CSE) is a kind of enumerative code and uses a probabilistic model built from the circular string of an input source for encoding a one-dimensional (1D) source. CSE is applicable to two-dimensional (2D) sources, such as images, by dealing with a line of pixels of a 2D source as a symbol of an extended alphabet. At the initial step of CSE encoding process, we need to output the number of occurrences of all symbols of the extended alphabet, so that the time complexity increases exponentially when the size of source becomes large. To reduce computational time, we can rearrange pixels of a 2D source into a 1D source string along a space-filling curve like a Hilbert curve. However, information on adjacent cells in a 2D source may be lost in the conversion. To reduce the time complexity and compress a 2D source without converting to a 1D source, we propose a new CSE which can encode a 2D source in a block-by-block fashion instead of in a line-by-line fashion. The proposed algorithm uses the flat torus of an input 2D source as a probabilistic model instead of the circular string of the source. Moreover, we prove the asymptotic optimality of the proposed algorithm for 2D general sources.

This paper presents an approach to analyze and model tasks of machines being operated. The executions of the tasks were captured through egocentric vision. Each task was decomposed into a sequence of physical hand-machine interactions, which are described with touch-based hotspots and interaction patterns. Modeling the tasks was achieved by integrating the experiences of multiple experts and using a hidden Markov model (HMM). Here, we present the results of more than 70 recorded egocentric experiences of the operation of a sewing machine. Our methods show good potential for the detection of hand-machine interactions and modeling of machine operation tasks.

Saliency detection is widely used in many vision tasks like image retrieval, compression and person re-identification. The deep-learning methods have got great results but most of them focused more on the performance ignored the efficiency of models, which were hard to transplant into other applications. So how to design a efficient model has became the main problem. In this letter, we propose parallel feature network, a saliency model which is built on convolution neural network (CNN) by a parallel method. Parallel dilation blocks are first used to extract features from different layers of CNN, then a parallel upsampling structure is adopted to upsample feature maps. Finally saliency maps are obtained by fusing summations and concatenations of feature maps. Our final model built on VGG-16 is much smaller and faster than existing saliency models and also achieves state-of-the-art performance.

In parallel computing systems, the interconnection network forms the critical infrastructure which enables robust and scalable communication between hundreds of thousands of nodes. The traditional packet-switched network tends to suffer from long communication time when network congestion occurs. In this context, we explore the use of circuit switching (CS) to replace packet switches with custom hardware that supports circuit-based switching efficiently with low latency. In our target CS network, a certain amount of bandwidth is guaranteed for each communication pair so that the network latency can be predictable when a limited number of node pairs exchange messages. The number of allocated time slots in every switch is a direct factor to affect the end-to-end latency, we thereby improve the slot utilization and develop a network topology generator to minimize the number of time slots optimized to target applications whose communication patterns are predictable. By a quantitative discrete-event simulation, we illustrate that the minimum necessary number of slots can be reduced to a small number in a generated topology by our design methodology while maintaining network cost 50% less than that in standard tori topologies.

When time difference of arrival (TDOA)-based bearing measurements are used in passive triangulation, the accuracy of localization depends on the geometric relationship between the emitter and the sensors. In particular, the localization accuracy varies with the geometric conditions in TDOA-based direction finding (DF) for bearing measurement and lines of bearing (LOBs) crossing for triangulation. To obtain an accurate estimate in passive triangulation using TDOA-based bearing measurements, we shall use these bearings selectively by considering geometric dilution of precision (GDOP) between the emitter and the sensors. To achieve this goal, we first define two GDOPs related to TDOA-based DF and LOBs crossing geometries, and then propose a new hybrid GDOP by combining these GDOPs for a better selection of bearings. Subsequently, two bearings with the lowest hybrid GDOP condition are chosen as the inputs to a triangulation localization algorithm. In simulations, the proposed method shows its enhancement to the localization accuracy.

This letter proposes a comprehensive assessment of the mission-level damage caused by cyberattacks on an entire defense mission system. We experimentally prove that our method produces swift and accurate assessment results and that it can be applied to actual defense applications. This study contributes to the enhancement of cyber damage assessment with a faster and more accurate method.

Photon upconversion (UC) is a technique to convert long wavelength light into short wavelength light. UC fluorescence by triplet-triplet annihilation (TTA) follows a mechanism involving two kinds of molecules as sensitizer and emitter. In this study, we constructed the photon UC dyes system that was applicable to weak excitation light and convert the red light into yellow light in high efficiency. The present result will be useful for the purpose of application to optical elements and light medical care.

The fifth generation mobile communications (5G) systems will need to support the ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC) to enable future mission-critical applications, e.g., self-driving cars and remote control. With the aim of verifying the feasibility of URLLC related 5G requirements in real environments, field trials of URLLC using a new frame structure are conducted in Yokohama, Japan. In this paper, we present the trial results and investigate the impact of the new frame structure and retransmission method on the URLLC performance. To reduce the user-plane latency and improve the packet success probability, a wider subcarrier spacing, self-contained frame structure, and acknowledgement/negative acknowledgement-less (ACK/NACK-less) retransmission are adopted. We verify the feasibility of URLLC in actual field tests using our prototype test-bed while implementing these techniques. The results show that for the packet size of 32 bytes the URLLC related requirements defined by the 3GPP are satisfied even at low signal-to-noise ratios or at non-line-of-sight transmission.

MDC-4 is the enhanced version of MDC-2, which is a well-known hash mode of block ciphers. However, it does not guarantee sufficient securities required for a cryptographic hash function. In the ideal cipher model, the MDC-4 compression function has the collision security bound close to 25n/8 and the preimage security bound close to 25n/4, where the underlying block cipher has the block size of n bits. We have studied how to improve MDC-4 with simple modification to strengthen its security. It is meaningful work because users often want to improve their familiar systems with low cost. In this paper, we achieve it by proposing MDC-4+, which is a light variation of MDC-4. We prove that MDC-4+ is much more secure than MDC-4 by showing that it has the collision security bound close to optimal 2n and the preimage security bound close to 24n/3. We also discuss its efficiency by comparing existing hash modes.

The potential transmission capacity of a standard single-mode fiber peaks at around 100Tb/s owing to fiber nonlinearity and the bandwidth limitation of amplifiers. As the last frontier of multiplexing, space-division multiplexing (SDM) has been studied intensively in recent years. Although there is still time to deploy such a novel fiber communication infrastructure; basic research on SDM has been carried out. Therefore, a comprehensive review is worthwhile at this time toward further practical investigations.

For capacity expansion of the Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS) safety confirmation system, frame slotted ALOHA with flag method has previously been proposed as an access control scheme. While it is always able to communicate in an optimum state, its maximum channel efficiency is only 36.8%. In this paper, we propose adding a reservation channel (R-Ch) to the frame slotted ALOHA with flag method to increase the upper limit of the channel efficiency. With an R-Ch, collision due to random channel selection is decreased by selecting channels in multiple steps, and the channel efficiency is improved up to 84.0%. The time required for accommodating 3 million mobile terminals, each sending one message, when using the flag method only and the flag method with an R-Ch are compared. It is shown that the accommodating time can be reduced to less than half by adding an R-Ch to the flag method.

Pronunciation is a fundamental factor in speaking and listening. However, instructions for important articulation have not been sufficiently provided in conventional computer-assisted language learning (CALL) systems. One typical case is the articulation of rounded vowels. Although lip protrusion is essential for their correct pronunciation, the perception of lip protrusion is often difficult for beginners. To tackle this issue, we propose an innovative method that will provide a comprehensive visual explanation for articulation. Lip movements are three-dimensionally measured, and face images or videos are pseudocoloured on the basis of the movements. The coloured regions represent the lip protrusion of rounded vowels. To verify the learning effect of the proposed method, we conducted experiments with Japanese undergraduates in Chinese classes. The results showed that our method has advantages over conventional video materials.

A compression-function-based MAC function called FMAC was presented as well as a vector-input PRF called vFMAC in 2016. They were proven to be secure PRFs on the assumption that their compression function is a secure PRF against related-key attacks with respect to their non-cryptographic permutations in the single user setting. In this paper, it is shown that both FMAC and vFMAC are also secure PRFs in the multi-user setting on the same assumption as in the single user setting. These results imply that their security in the multi-user setting does not degrade with the number of the users and is as good as in the single user setting.

We introduce a new type of Montgomery-like square root formulae in GF(2m) defined by an arbitrary irreducible trinomial, which is more efficient compared with classic square root operation. By choosing proper Montgomery factors for different kind of trinomials, the space and time complexities of such square root computations match or outperform the best results. A practical application of the Montgomery-like square root in inversion computation is also presented.