A problem of global stabilization of a class of approximately feedback linearized systems is considered. A new system structural feature is the presence of non-trivial diagonal terms along with nonlinearity, which has not been addressed by the previous control results. The stability analysis reveals a new relationship between the time-varying rates of system parameters and system nonlinearity along with our controller. Two examples are given for illustration.

A logo is a symbolic presentation that is designed not only to identify a product manufacturer but also to attract the attention of shoppers. Shoe logos are a challenging subject for automatic extraction and recognition using image analysis techniques because they have characteristics that distinguish them from those of other products; that is, there is much within-class variation in the appearance of shoe logos. In this paper, we propose an automatic extraction and recognition method for shoe logos with a wide variety of appearance using a limited number of training samples. The proposed method employs maximally stable extremal regions for the initial region extraction, an iterative algorithm for region grouping, and gradient features and a support vector machine for logo recognition. The results of performance evaluation experiments using a logo dataset that consists of a wide variety of appearances show that the proposed method achieves promising performance for both logo extraction and recognition.

This paper proposes a matched myriad filter based detector for MSK signal under symmetric alpha-stable (SαS) noise. As shown in the previous literatures, SαS distribution is more accurate to characterize the atmospheric noise, which is the main interference in VLF communication. MSK modulation is widely used in VLF communication for its high spectral efficiency and constant envelope properties. However, the optimal detector for MSK under SαS noise is rarely reported due to its memory modulation characteristic. As MSK signal can be viewed as a sinusoidal pulse weighted offset QPSK (OQPSK), a matched myriad filter is proposed to derive a near-optimal detection performance for the in-phase and quadrature components, respectively. Simulations for MSK demodulation under SαS noise with different α validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this paper, operator-based reset control for a class of nonlinear systems with unknown bounded disturbance is considered using right coprime factorization approach. In detail, firstly, for dealing with the unknown bounded disturbance of the nonlinear systems, operator-based reset control framework is proposed based on right coprime factorization. By the proposed framework, robust stability of the nonlinear systems with unknown bounded disturbance is guaranteed by using the proposed reset controller. Secondly, under the reset control framework, an optimal design scheme is discussed for minimizing the error norm based on the proposed operator-based reset controller. Finally, for conforming effectiveness of the proposed design scheme, a simulation example is given.

We propose an estimation method of pedestrian detectability considering the driver's visual adaptation to drastic illumination change, which has not been studied in previous works. We assume that driver's visual characteristics change in proportion to the elapsed time after illumination change. In this paper, as a solution, we construct multiple estimators corresponding to different elapsed periods, and estimate the detectability by switching them according to the elapsed period. To evaluate the proposed method, we construct an experimental setup to present a participant with illumination changes and conduct a preliminary simulated experiment to measure and estimate the pedestrian detectability according to the elapsed period. Results show that the proposed method can actually estimate the detectability accurately after a drastic illumination change.

A dynamic neural network has ternary connection parameters and can generate various binary periodic orbits. In order to analyze the dynamics, we present two feature quantities which characterize stability and transient phenomenon of a periodic orbit. Calculating the feature quantities, we investigate influence of connection sparsity on stability of a target periodic orbit corresponding to a circuit control signal. As the sparsity increases, at first, stability of a target periodic orbit tends to be stronger. In the next, the stability tends to be weakened and various transient phenomena exist. In the most sparse case, the network has many periodic orbits without transient phenomenon.

In this paper, we study a variant of the MINIMUM DOMINATING SET problem. Given an unweighted undirected graph G=(V,E) of n=|V| vertices, the goal of the MINIMUM SINGLE DOMINATING CYCLE problem (MinSDC) is to find a single shortest cycle which dominates all vertices, i.e., a cycle C such that for the set V(C) of vertices in C and the set N(V(C)) of neighbor vertices of C, V(G)=V(C)∪N(V(C)) and |V(C)| is minimum over all dominating cycles in G [6], [17], [24]. In this paper we consider the (in)approximability of MinSDC if input graphs are restricted to some special classes of graphs. We first show that MinSDC is still NP-hard to approximate even when restricted to planar, bipartite, chordal, or r-regular (r≥3). Then, we show the (lnn+1)-approximability and the (1-ε)lnn-inapproximability of MinSDC on split graphs under P≠NP. Furthermore, we explicitly design a linear-time algorithm to solve MinSDC for graphs with bounded treewidth and estimate the hidden constant factor of its running time-bound.

Many concurrency control protocols for B-trees use latch-coupling because its execution is efficient on a single machine. Some studies have indicated that latch-coupling may involve a performance bottleneck when using multicore processors in a shared-everything environment, but no studies have considered the possible performance bottleneck caused by sending messages between processing elements (PEs) in shared-nothing environments. We propose two new concurrency control protocols, “LCFB” and “LCFB-link”, which require no latch-coupling in optimistic processes. The LCFB-link also innovates B-link approach within each PE to reduce the cost of modifications in the PE, as a solution to the difficulty of consistency management for the side pointers in a parallel B-tree. The B-link algorithm is well known as a protocol without latch-coupling, but B-link has the difficulty of guaranteeing the consistency of the side pointers in a parallel B-tree. Experimental results in various environments indicated that the system throughput of the proposed protocols was always superior to those of the conventional protocols, particularly in large-scale configurations, and using LCFB-link was effective for higher update ratios. In addition, to mitigate access skew, data should migrate between PEs. We have demonstrated that our protocols always improve the system throughput and are effective as concurrency controls for data migration.

In this study, toward the development of smartphone-based monitoring system for life logging, we collect over 1,400 hours of data by recording including both the outdoor and indoor daily activities of 19 subjects, under practical conditions with a smartphone and a small camera. We then construct a huge human activity database which consists of an environmental sound signal, triaxial acceleration signals and manually annotated activity tags. Using our constructed database, we evaluate the activity recognition performance of deep neural networks (DNNs), which have achieved great performance in various fields, and apply DNN-based adaptation techniques to improve the performance with only a small amount of subject-specific training data. We experimentally demonstrate that; 1) the use of multi-modal signal, including environmental sound and triaxial acceleration signals with a DNN is effective for the improvement of activity recognition performance, 2) the DNN can discriminate specified activities from a mixture of ambiguous activities, and 3) DNN-based adaptation methods are effective even if only a small amount of subject-specific training data is available.

Threats to a society and its social infrastructure are inevitable and endanger human life and welfare. Resilience is a core concept to cope with such threats in strengthening risk management. A resilient system adapts to an incident in a timely manner before it would result in a failure. This paper discusses the secondary use of personal data as a key element in such conditions and the relevant process mining in order to reduce IT risk on safety. It realizes completeness for such a proof on data breach in an acceptable manner to mitigate the usability problem of soundness for resilience. Acceptable soundness is still required and realized in our scheme for a fundamental privacy-enhancing trust infrastructure. Our proposal achieves an IT baseline protection and properly treats personal data on security as Ground Truth for deriving acceptable statements on data breach. An important role plays reliable broadcast by means of the block chain. This approaches a personal IT risk management with privacy-enhancing cryptographic mechanisms and Open Data without trust as belief in a single-point-of-failure. Instead it strengthens communities of trust.

Query autocompletion is an important and practical technique when users want to search for desirable information. As mobile devices become more and more popular, one of the main applications is location-aware service, such as Web mapping. In this paper, we propose a new solution to location-aware query autocompletion. We devise a trie-based index structure and integrate spatial information into trie nodes. Our method is able to answer both range and top-k queries. In addition, we discuss the extension of our method to support the error tolerant feature in case user's queries contain typographical errors. Experiments on real datasets show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods in terms of query processing performance.

We examined the novel aggregation control of the LC and monomer during formation of the polymer walls from a LC/monomer mixture in order to suppress the presence of the residual monomers and polymer networks in the pixel areas. The method is utilization of the differing wettabilities among LC and monomer molecules on a substrate surface. We patterned a substrate surface with a fluororesin and a polyimide film, and promoted phase separation of the LC and monomer by cooling process. This resulted in the LC and monomer aggregates primarily existing in the pixel areas and non-pixel areas, respectively. Moreover, the polymer-walls structure which was formed in this method partitioned into individual pixels in a lattice region and prevented the LC from flowing. This polymer-walls formation technique will be useful for developing high-quality flexible LCDs.

Systematic research on electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) in Japan started in 1977 by the establishment of a technical committee on “environmental electromagnetic engineering” named EMCJ, which was founded both in the Institute of Electronics and Communication Engineers or the present IEICE (Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers) and in the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan or the IEEJ. The research activities have been continued as the basic field of interdisciplinary study to harmonize even in the electromagnetic (EM) environment where radio waves provide intolerable EM disturbances to electronic equipment and to that environment itself. The subjects and their outcomes which the EMCJ has dealt with during about 40 years from the EMCJ establishment include the evaluation of EM environment, EMC of electric and electronic equipment, and EMC of biological effects involving bioelectromagnetics and so on. In this paper, the establishment history and structure of the EMCJ are reviewed along with the change in activities, and topics of the technical reports presented at EMCJ meetings from 2006 to 2016 are surveyed. In addition, internationalization and its related campaign are presented in conjunction with the EMCJ research activities, and the status quo of the EMCJ under the IEICE is also discussed along with the prospects.

In our previous work, we introduced new concepts of secure scan design; shift register equivalent circuits (SR-equivalents, for short) and strongly secure circuits, and also introduced generalized shift registers (GSRs, for short) to apply them to secure scan design. In this paper, we combine both concepts of SR-equivalents and strongly secure circuits and apply them to GSRs, and consider the synthesis problem of strongly secure SR-equivalents using GSRs. We also consider the enumeration problem of GSRs that are strongly secure and SR-equivalent, i.e., the cardinality of the class of strongly secure SR-equivalent GSRs to clarify the security level of the secure scan architecture.

As the role of wireless communication is becoming more important for realizing a future connected society for not only humans but also things, spectrum scarcity is becoming severe, because of the huge numbers of mobile terminals and many types of applications in use. In order to realize sustainable wireless connection under limited spectrum resources in a future wireless world, a new dynamic spectrum management scheme should be developed that considers the surrounding radio environment and user preferences. In this paper, we discuss a new spectrum utilization framework for a future wireless world called the “smart spectrum.” There are four main issues related to realizing the smart spectrum. First, in order to recognize the spectrum environment accurately, spectrum measurement is an important technology. Second, spectrum modeling for estimating the spectrum usage and the spectrum environment by using measurement results is required for designing wireless parameters for dynamic spectrum use in a shared spectrum environment. Third, in order to effectively gather the measurement results and provide the spectrum information to users, a measurement-based spectrum database can be used. Finally, smart spectrum management that operates in combination with a spectrum database is required for realizing efficient and organized dynamic spectrum utilization. In this paper, we discuss the concept of the smart spectrum, fundamental research studies of the smart spectrum, and the direction of development of the smart spectrum for targeting the future wireless world.

This paper expands Bartlett's bisection theorem. The theory of modal S-parameters and their circuit representation is constructed from a group-theoretic perspective. Criteria for the division of a circuit at a fixed node whose state is distinguished by the irreducible representation of its stabilizer subgroup are obtained, after being inductively introduced using simple circuits as examples. Because these criteria use only circuit symmetry and do not require human judgment, the distinction is reliable and implementable in a computer. With this knowledge, the entire circuit can be characterized by a finite combination of smaller circuits. Reducing the complexity of symmetric circuits contributes to improved insights into their characterization, and to savings of time and effort in calculations when applied to large-scale circuits. A three-phase filter and a branch-line coupler are analyzed as application examples of circuit and electromagnetic field analysis, respectively.

Named Entity Translation Equivalents extraction plays a critical role in machine translation (MT) and cross language information retrieval (CLIR). Traditional methods are often based on large-scale parallel or comparable corpora. However, the applicability of these studies is constrained, mainly because of the scarcity of parallel corpora of the required scale, especially for language pairs of Chinese and Japanese. In this paper, we propose a method considering the characteristics of Chinese and Japanese to automatically extract the Chinese-Japanese Named Entity (NE) translation equivalents based on inductive learning (IL) from monolingual corpora. The method adopts the Chinese Hanzi and Japanese Kanji Mapping Table (HKMT) to calculate the similarity of the NE instances between Japanese and Chinese. Then, we use IL to obtain partial translation rules for NEs by extracting the different parts from high similarity NE instances in Chinese and Japanese. In the end, the feedback processing updates the Chinese and Japanese NE entity similarity and rule sets. Experimental results show that our simple, efficient method, which overcomes the insufficiency of the traditional methods, which are severely dependent on bilingual resource. Compared with other methods, our method combines the language features of Chinese and Japanese with IL for automatically extracting NE pairs. Our use of a weak correlation bilingual text sets and minimal additional knowledge to extract NE pairs effectively reduces the cost of building the corpus and the need for additional knowledge. Our method may help to build a large-scale Chinese-Japanese NE translation dictionary using monolingual corpora.

This paper proposes 0-1-A-Ā LUT, a new programmable logic using atom switches, and a delay-optimal mapping algorithm for it. Atom switch is a non-volatile memory device of very small geometry which is fabricated between metal layers of a VLSI, and it can be used as a switch device of very small on-resistance and parasitic capacitance. While considerable area reduction of Look Up Tables (LUTs) used in conventional Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) has been achieved by simply replacing each SRAM element with a memory element using a pair of atom switches, our 0-1-A-Ā LUT achieves further area and delay reduction. Unlike the conventional atom-switch-based LUT in which all k input signals are fed to a MUX, one of input signals is fed to the switch array, resulting area reduction due to the reduced number of inputs of the MUX from 2k to 2k-1, as well as delay reduction due to reduced fanout load of the input buffers. Since the fanout of this input buffers depends on the mapped logic function, this paper also proposes technology mapping algorithms to select logic function of fewer number of fanouts of input buffers to achieve further delay reduction. From our experiments, the circuit delay using our k-LUT is 0.94% smaller in the best case compared with using the conventional atom-switch-based k-LUT.

This paper discusses the use of a common computer mouse as a pointing interface for tabletop displays. In the use of a common computer mouse for tabletop displays, there might be an angular distance between the screen coordinates and the mouse control coordinates. To align those coordinates, this paper introduces a screen coordinates calibration technique using a shadow cursor. A shadow cursor is the basic idea of manipulating a mouse cursor without any visual feedbacks. The shadow cursor plays an important role in obtaining the angular distance between the two coordinates. It enables the user to perform a simple mouse manipulation so that screen coordinates calibration will be completed in less than a second.

This study focuses on the design of electrical stimulator for retinal prosthesis. The stimulator must be designed such that the occurrence of electrolysis or any irreversible process in the electrodes and flexible lead is prevented in order to achieve safe stimulation over long periods using the large number of electrodes. Some types of biphasic current pulse circuits, charge balance circuits, and AC power delivery circuits were developed to address this issue. Electronic circuitry must be introduced in the stimulator to achieve the large number of electrodes required to obtain high quality of vision. The concept of a smart electrode, in which a microchip is embedded inside an electrode, is presented for future retinal prostheses with over 1000 electrodes.