A lens-integrated surface-emitting DFB laser and its application to low-cost single-mode optical sub-assemblies (OSAs) are discussed. By using the LISEL, high-efficient optical coupling with reduced number of optical components and non-hermetic packaging are demonstrated. Designing the integrated lens of LISELs makes it possible to achieve passive alignment optical coupling to an SMF without the need for an additional lens. For SiP coupling, the light-emission angle from the LISEL can be controlled by the mirror angle and by displacing the lens. The capability for a low coupling loss of 3.9 dB between the LISEL and a grating coupler on the SiP platform was demonstrated. The LISEL with facet-free structure, integrating DBR mirror, PD, and window structure on its end facet, showed the same lasing performance as the conventional laser with AR facet coating. A storage test (200-hour saturated pressure-cooker test (PCT) at 138°C and 85% RH.) showed that the lasing characteristics did not degrade with high-humidity, demonstrating the potential for applying non-hermetic packaging. Our results indicate that the LISEL is one of the promising light sources for creating cost-effective OSAs.

To meet the demand for continuous increase in data traffic, full usage of polarization freedom of light is becoming inevitable in the next-generation optical communication and datacenter networks. In particular, Stokes-vector modulation direct-detection (SVM-DD) formats are expected as potentially cost-effective method to transmit multi-level signals without using costly coherent transceivers in the short-reach links. For the SVM-DD formats to be practical, both the transmitter and receiver need to be substantially simpler, smaller, and lower-cost as compared to coherent counterparts. To this end, we have recently proposed and demonstrated novel SV modulator and receiver circuits realized on monolithic InP platforms. With compact non-interferometric configurations, relatively simple fabrication procedures, and compatibility with other active photonic components, the proposed devices should be attractive candidate in realizing low-cost monolithic transceivers for SVM formats. In this paper, we review our approaches as well as recent progresses and provide future prospects.

Ring-based topology is popular for optical network-on-chip. However, the network congestion is serious for ring topology, especially when optical circuit-switching is employed. In this paper, we proposed an algorithm to build a low congestion multi-ring architecture for optical network-on-chip without additional wavelength or scheduling overhead. A network congestion model is established with new network congestion factor defined. An algorithm is developed to optimize the low congestion multi-ring topology. Finally, a case study is shown and the simulation results by OPNET verify the superiority over the traditional ONoC architecture.

This paper focuses mainly on issues related to the pricing of American options under a fuzzy environment by taking into account the clustering of the underlying asset price volatility, leverage effect and stochastic jumps. By treating the volatility as a parabolic fuzzy number, we constructed a Levy-GJR-GARCH model based on an infinite pure jump process and combined the model with fuzzy simulation technology to perform numerical simulations based on the least squares Monte Carlo approach and the fuzzy binomial tree method. An empirical study was performed using American put option data from the Standard & Poor's 100 index. The findings are as follows: under a fuzzy environment, the result of the option valuation is more precise than the result under a clear environment, pricing simulations of short-term options have higher precision than those of medium- and long-term options, the least squares Monte Carlo approach yields more accurate valuation than the fuzzy binomial tree method, and the simulation effects of different Levy processes indicate that the NIG and CGMY models are superior to the VG model. Moreover, the option price increases as the time to expiration of options is extended and the exercise price increases, the membership function curve is asymmetric with an inclined left tendency, and the fuzzy interval narrows as the level set α and the exponent of membership function n increase. In addition, the results demonstrate that the quasi-random number and Brownian Bridge approaches can improve the convergence speed of the least squares Monte Carlo approach.

The accurate assessment of infants' pain is important for understanding their medical conditions and developing suitable treatment. Pediatric studies reported that the inadequate treatment of infants' pain might cause various neuroanatomical and psychological problems. The fact that infants can not communicate verbally motivates increasing interests to develop automatic pain assessment system that provides continuous and accurate pain assessment. In this paper, we propose a new set of pain facial activity features to describe the infants' facial expression of pain. Both dynamic facial texture feature and dynamic geometric feature are extracted from video sequences and utilized to classify facial expression of infants as pain or no pain. For the dynamic analysis of facial expression, we construct spatiotemporal domain representation for texture features and time series representation (i.e. time series of frame-level features) for geometric features. Multiple facial features are combined through both feature fusion and decision fusion schemes to evaluate their effectiveness in infants' pain assessment. Experiments are conducted on the video acquired from NICU infants, and the best accuracy of the proposed pain assessment approaches is 95.6%. Moreover, we find that although decision fusion does not perform better than that of feature fusion, the False Negative Rate of decision fusion (6.2%) is much lower than that of feature fusion (25%).

Certain open issues challenge the software engineering of autonomous robot software (ARS). One issue is to provide enabling software technologies to support autonomous and rational behaviours of robots operating in an open environment, and another issue is the development of an effective engineering approach to manage the complexity of ARS to simplify the development, deployment and evolution of ARS. We introduce the software framework AutoRobot to address these issues. This software provides abstraction and a model of accompanying behaviours to formulate the behaviour patterns of autonomous robots and enrich the coherence between task behaviours and observation behaviours, thereby improving the capabilities of obtaining and using the feedback regarding the changes. A dual-loop control model is presented to support flexible interactions among the control activities to support continuous adjustments of the robot's behaviours. A multi-agent software architecture is proposed to encapsulate the fundamental software components. Unlike most existing research, in AutoRobot, the ARS is designed as a multi-agent system in which the software agents interact and cooperate with each other to accomplish the robot's task. AutoRobot provides reusable software packages to support the development of ARS and infrastructure integrated with ROS to support the decentralized deployment and running of ARS. We develop an ARS sample to illustrate how to use the framework and validate its effectiveness.

In this letter, we explored the usage of spatio-temporal information in one unified framework to improve the performance of multichannel speech recognition. Generalized cross correlation (GCC) is served as spatial feature compensation, and an attention mechanism across time is embedded within long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks. Experiments on the AMI meeting corpus show that the proposed method provides a 8.2% relative improvement in word error rate (WER) over the model trained directly on the concatenation of multiple microphone outputs.

This paper proposes a hardware configuration for uplink multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) transmissions in a distributed antenna system (DAS). The demand for high-speed transmission in the uplink has increased recently, because of which standardizations in LTE-advanced and IEEE 802.11ax networks is currently underway. User terminal (UT) scheduling on the downlink MU-MIMO transmission is easy even in unlicensed band such as those in wireless local area network (WLAN) systems. However, the detailed management of the UTs is difficult on the uplink MU-MIMO transmissions because of the decentralized wireless access control. The proposed configuration allows an antenna to be selected from an external device on the access point (AP). All AP antennas are divided into groups, and the received signal in each group is input to the amplitude detector via a directional coupler. Subsequently, the selected antenna is fed by a multiple-to-one switch instead of a matrix switch. To clarify the effectiveness of the proposed configuration, we conduct computer simulations based on the ray-tracing method for propagation channels in an indoor environment.

Simulation-based verification of hardware designs, in particular, register-transfer-level (RTL) designs, has been widely used, and has been one of the major bottlenecks in design processes. One of the approaches is coverage-driven verification, of its target is improvement of some metric called coverage. In a prior work of ours, we have proposed a coverage-driven verification using both randomly generated simulation patterns and patterns generated by a SAT (satisfiability) solver, and have shown its effectiveness. In this paper, we extend this approach with an SMT (satisfiability modulo theory) solver, which can handle arithmetic relations among integer, floating-point or bit-vector variables. Experimental results show that the more arithmetic modules are included, the more an SMT-based method gets superior to the method using only a SAT solver.

Utilizing software architecture patterns is important for reducing maintenance costs. However, maintaining code according to the constraints defined by the architecture patterns is time-consuming work. As described herein, we propose a technique to detect code fragments that are incompliant to the architecture as fine-grained architectural violations. For this technique, the dependence graph among code fragments extracted from the source code and the inference rules according to the architecture are the inputs. A set of candidate components to which a code fragment can be affiliated is attached to each node of the graph and is updated step-by-step. The inference rules express the components' responsibilities and dependency constraints. They remove candidate components of each node that do not satisfy the constraints from the current estimated state of the surrounding code fragment. If the inferred role of a code fragment does not include the component that the code fragment currently belongs to, then it is detected as a violation. We have implemented our technique for the Model-View-Controller for Web Application architecture pattern. By applying the technique to web applications implemented using Play Framework, we obtained accurate detection results. We also investigated how much does each inference rule contribute to the detection of violations.

An important step for improving software analyzability is applying refactorings during the maintenance phase to remove bad smells, especially the long method bad smell. Long method bad smell occurs most frequently and is a root cause of other bad smells. However, no research has proposed an approach to repeating refactoring identification, suggestion, and application until all long method bad smells have been removed completely without reducing software analyzability. This paper proposes an effective approach to identifying refactoring opportunities and suggesting an effective refactoring set for complete removal of long method bad smell without reducing code analyzability. This approach, called the long method remover or LMR, uses refactoring enabling conditions based on program analysis and code metrics to identify four refactoring techniques and uses a technique embedded in JDeodorant to identify extract method. For effective refactoring set suggestion, LMR uses two criteria: code analyzability level and the number of statements impacted by the refactorings. LMR also uses side effect analysis to ensure behavior preservation. To evaluate LMR, we apply it to the core package of a real world java application. Our evaluation criteria are 1) the preservation of code functionality, 2) the removal rate of long method characteristics, and 3) the improvement on analyzability. The result showed that the methods that apply suggested refactoring sets can completely remove long method bad smell, still have behavior preservation, and have not decreased analyzability. It is concluded that LMR meets the objectives in almost all classes. We also discussed the issues we found during evaluation as lesson learned.

This study proposes a mathematical model of a gesture-based pointing interface system for simulating pointing behaviors in various situations. We assume an interaction between a pointing interface and a user as a human-in-the-loop system and describe it using feedback control theory. The model is formulated as a hybrid of a target value follow-up component and a disturbance compensation one. These are induced from the same feedback loop but with different parameter sets to describe human pointing characteristics well. The two optimal parameter sets were determined individually to represent actual pointing behaviors accurately for step input signals and random walk disturbance sequences, respectively. The calibrated model is used to simulate pointing behaviors for arbitrary input signals expected in practical situations. Through experimental evaluations, we quantitatively analyzed the performance of the proposed hybrid model regarding how accurately it can simulate actual pointing behaviors and also discuss the advantage regarding the basic non-hybrid model. Model refinements for further accuracy are also suggested based on the evaluation results.

A lot of vision systems have been embedded in devices around us, like mobile phones, vehicles and UAVs. Many of them still need interactive operations of human users. However, specifying accurate object information could be a challenging task due to video jitters caused by camera shakes and target motions. In this paper, we first collect practical hand drawn bounding boxes on real-life videos which are captured by hand-held cameras and UAV-based cameras. We give a deep look into human-computer interactive operations on unstable images. The collected data shows that human input suffers heavy deviations which are harmful to interaction accuracy. To achieve robust interactions on unstable platforms, we propose a target-focused video stabilization method which utilizes a proposal-based object detector and a tracking-based motion estimation component. This method starts with a single manual click and outputs stabilized video stream in which the specified target stays almost stationary. Our method removes not only camera jitters but also target motions simultaneously, therefore offering an comfortable environment for users to do further interactive operations. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method effectively eliminates image vibrations and significantly increases human input accuracy.

This paper investigates an adaptive movable access point (AMAP) system and explores its feasibility in a static indoor classroom environment with an applied wireless local area network (WLAN) system. In the AMAP system, the positions of multiple access points (APs) are adaptively moved in accordance with clustered user groups, which ensures effective coverage for non-uniform user distributions over the target area. This enhances the signal to interference and noise power ratio (SINR) performance. In order to derive the appropriate AP positions, we utilize the k-means method in the AMAP system. To accurately estimate the position of each user within the target area for user clustering, we use the general methods of received signal strength indicator (RSSI) or time of arrival (ToA), measured by the WLAN systems. To clarify the basic effectiveness of the AMAP system, we first evaluate the SINR performance of the AMAP system and a conventional fixed-position AP system with equal intervals using computer simulations. Moreover, we demonstrate the quantitative improvement of the SINR performance by analyzing the ToA and RSSI data measured in an indoor classroom environment in order to clarify the feasibility of the AMAP system.

Extracting 3D information from a single image is an interesting but ill-posed problem. Especially for those artificial objects with less texture such as smooth metal devices, the decrease of object detail makes the problem more challenging. Aiming at the texture-less object with symmetric structure, this paper proposes a novel method for 3D pose estimation from a single image by introducing implicit structural symmetry and context constraint as priori-knowledge. Firstly, by parameterized representation, the texture-less object is decomposed into a series of sub-objects with regular geometric primitives. Accordingly, the problem of 3D pose estimation is converted to a parameter estimation problem, which is implemented by primitive fitting algorithm. Then, the context prior among sub-objects is introduced for parameter refinement via the augmentedLagrange optimization. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by the experiments based on simulated and measured data.

A vertex subset F ⊆ V(G) is called a cyclic vertex-cut set of a connected graph G if G-F is disconnected such that at least two components in G-F contain cycles. The cyclic vertex connectivity is the cardinality of a minimum cyclic vertex-cut set. In this paper, we show that the cyclic vertex connectivity of the trivalent Cayley graphs TGn is equal to eight for n ≥ 4.

Approximate computing is a promising solution for future energy-efficient designs because it can provide great improvements in performance, area and/or energy consumption over traditional exact-computing designs for non-critical error-tolerant applications. However, the most challenging issue in designing approximate circuits is how to guarantee the pre-specified computation accuracy while achieving energy reduction and performance improvement. To address this problem, this paper starts from the state-of-the-art general approximate adder model (GeAr) and extends it for more possible approximate design candidates by relaxing the design restrictions. And then a maximum-error-distance-based performance/accuracy formulation, which can be used to select the performance/energy-accuracy optimal design from the extended design space, is proposed. Our evaluation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of area overhead, performance, energy consumption, and computation accuracy.

For the reconstruction of the feedback polynomial of a synchronous scrambler placed after a convolutional encoder, the existing algorithms require the prior knowledge of a dual word of the convolutional code. To address the case of a dual word being unknown, a new algorithm for the reconstruction of the feedback polynomial based on triple correlation characteristic of an m-sequence is proposed. First, the scrambled convolutional code sequence is divided into bit blocks; the product of the scrambled bit blocks with a dual word is proven to be an m-sequence with the same period as the synchronous scrambler. Second, based on the triple correlation characteristic of the generated m-sequence, a dual word is estimated; the generator polynomial of the generated m-sequence is computed by two locations of the triple correlation peaks. Finally, the feedback polynomial is reconstructed using the generator polynomial of the generated m-sequence. As the received sequence may contain bit errors, a method for detecting triple correlation peaks based on the constant false-alarm criterion is elaborated. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is effective. Ulike the existing algorithms available, there is no need to know a dual word a priori and the reconstruction result is more accurate. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is robust to bit errors.

Location information is meaningful information for future ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems) world. Especially, the accuracy of the information is required because the accuracy decides the quality of ITS services. For realization of high precision positioning, Kinematic positioning technique has been attracting attention. The Kinematic positioning requires the configuration of many positioning parameters. However, the configuration is difficult because optimal parameter differs according to user's environment. In this paper, we will propose an estimation method of optimal parameter according to the environment. Further, we will propose an elimination method of unreliable positioning results. Hereby, we can acquire extensively only the reliable positioning results. By using the actual vehicle traveling data, the ability and the applicable range of the proposed method will be shown. The result will show that our proposed method improves the acquision rate of reliable positioning results and mitigates the acquision rate of the unreliable positioning results.

Cellular heterogeneous networks (HetNets) with densely deployed small cells can effectively boost network capacity. The co-channel interference and the prominent energy consumption are two crucial issues in HetNets which need to be addressed. Taking the traffic variations into account, this paper proposes a theoretical framework to analyze spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) considering jointly further-enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (FeICIC) and spectrum allocation (SA) via a stochastic geometric approach for a two-tier downlink HetNet. SE and EE are respectively derived and validated by Monte Carlo simulations. To create spectrum and energy efficient HetNets that can adapt to traffic demands, a non-convex optimization problem with the power control factor, resource partitioning fraction and number of subchannels for the SE and EE tradeoff is formulated, based on which, an iterative algorithm with low complexity is proposed to achieve the sub-optimal solution. Numerical results confirm the effectiveness of the joint FeICIC and SA scheme in HetNets. Meanwhile, a system design insight on resource allocation for the SE and EE tradeoff is provided.