The sense of presence is crucial to evaluate the performance of audio-visual (AV) equipment and content. Previously, the overall presence was evaluated for a set of AV content items by asking subjects to judge the presence of the entire content item. In this study, the sense of presence is evaluated for a time-series using the method of continuous judgment by category. Specifically, the audio signals of 40 content items with durations of approximately 30 s each were recorded with a dummy head, and then presented as stimuli to subjects via headphones. The corresponding visual signals were recorded using a video camera in the full-HD format, and reproduced on a 65-inch display. In the experiments, 20 subjects evaluated the instantaneous sense of presence of each item on a seven-point scale under two conditions: audio-only or audio-visual. At the end of the time-series, the subjects also evaluated the overall presence of the item by seven categories. Based on these results, the effects of visual information on the sense of presence were examined. The overall presence is highly correlated with the ten-percentile exceeded presence score, S10, which is the score that is exceeded for the 10% of the time during the responses. Based on the instantaneous presence data in this study, we are one step closer to our ultimate goal of developing a real-time operational presence meter.

While online social networking is a popular way for people to share information, it carries the risk of unintentionally disclosing personal information. One way to reduce this risk is to anonymize personal information in messages before they are posted. Furthermore, if personal information is somehow disclosed, the person who disclosed it should be identifiable. Several methods developed for anonymizing personal information in natural language text simply remove sensitive phrases, making the anonymized text message unnatural. Other methods change the message by using synonymization or structural alteration to create fingerprints for detecting disclosure, but they do not support the creation of a sufficient number of fingerprints for friends of an online social network user. We have developed a system for anonymizing personal information in text messages that generalizes sensitive phrases. It also creates a sufficient number of fingerprints of a message by using synonyms so that, if personal information is revealed online, the person who revealed it can be identified. A distribution metric is used to ensure that the degree of anonymization is appropriate for each group of friends. A threshold is used to improve the naturalness of the fingerprinted messages so that they do not catch the attention of attackers. Evaluation using about 55,000 personal tweets in English demonstrated that our system creates sufficiently natural fingerprinted messages for friends and groups of friends. The practicality of the system was demonstrated by creating a web application for controlling messages posted on Facebook.

In this paper, we propose a novel energy-efficient sensor device management scheme called sensor device personalization (SDP) for the Internet of things (IoT) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) based on the IEEE 802.15.4 unslotted carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA). In the IoT and WSNs with the star topology, a coordinator device (CD), user devices (UDs), and sensor devices (SDs) compose a network, and the UDs such as smart phones and tablet PCs manage the SDs, which consist of various sensors and communication modules, e.g., smart fridge, robot cleaner, heating and cooling system, and so on, through the CD. Thus, the CD consumes a lot of energy to relay packets between the UDs and the SDs and also has a longer packet transmission delay. Therefore, in order to reduce the energy consumption and packet transmission delay, in the proposed SDP scheme, the UDs obtain a list of SD profiles (including SDs' address information) that the UDs want to manage from the CD, and then the UDs and the SDs directly exchange control messages using the addresses of the SDs. Through analytical models, we show that the proposed SDP scheme outperforms the conventional scheme in terms of normalized throughput, packet transmission delay, packet loss probability, and total energy consumption.

With the rapid growth of high performance ICT (Information Communication Technologies) devices such as smart phones and tablet PCs, multitasking has become one of the popular ways of using mobile devices. The reasons users have adopted multitask operation are that it reduces the level of dissatisfaction regarding waiting time and makes effective use of time by switching their attention from the waiting process to other content. This is a good solution to the problem of waiting; however, it may cause another problem, which is the increase in traffic volume due to the multiple applications being worked on simultaneously. Thus, an effective method to control throughput adapted to the multitasking situation is required. This paper proposes a transmission rate control method for web browsing that takes multitasking behavior into account and quantitatively demonstrates the effect of service by two different field experiments. The main contribution of this paper is to present a service design process for a new transmission rate control that takes into account human-network interaction based on the human-centered approach. We show that the degree of satisfaction in relation to waiting time did not degrade even when a field trial using a testbed showed that throughput of the background task was reduced by 40%.

This paper proposes a mixed-grained reconfigurable architecture consisting of fine-grained and coarse-grained fabrics, each of which can be configured for different levels of reliability depending on the reliability requirement of target applications, e.g. mission-critical applications to consumer products. Thanks to the fine-grained fabrics, the architecture can accommodate a state machine, which is indispensable for exploiting C-based behavioral synthesis to trade latency with resource usage through multi-step processing using dynamic reconfiguration. In implementing the architecture, the strategy of dynamic reconfiguration, the assignment of configuration storage and the number of implementable states are key factors that determine the achievable trade-off between used silicon area and latency. We thus split the configuration bits into two classes; state-wise configuration bits and state-invariant configuration bits for minimizing area overhead of configuration bit storage. Through a case study, we experimentally explore the appropriate number of implementable states. A proof-of-concept VLSI chip was fabricated in 65nm process. Measurement results show that applications on the chip can be working in a harsh radiation environment. Irradiation tests also show the correlation between the number of sensitive bits and the mean time to failure. Furthermore, the temporal error rate of an example application due to soft errors in the datapath was measured and demonstrated for reliability-aware mapping.

This paper proposes an ultra-low-voltage, wide signal swing, and clock-scalable differential dynamic amplifier using a common-mode voltage detection technique. The essential characteristics of an amplifier, such as gain, linearity, power consumption, noise, etc., are analyzed. In measurement, the proposed dynamic amplifier achieves a 13dB gain with less than 1dB drop over a differential output signal swing of 340mVpp with a supply voltage of 0.5V. The attained maximum operating frequency is 700MHz. With a 0.7V supply, the gain increases to 16dB with a signal swing of 700mVpp. The prototype amplifier is fabricated in 90nm CMOS technology with the low threshold voltage and the deep N-well options.

The reliability of electromagnetic relay (EMR) which contains a permanent magnet (PM) can be improved by a robust design method. In this parameter design process, the calculation of electromagnetic system is very important. In analytical calculation, PM is often equivalent to a lumped parameter model of one magnetic resistance and one magnetic potential, but significant error is often caused; in order to increase the accuracy, a distributed parameter calculation model (DPM) of PM bar is established; solution procedure as well as verification condition of this model is given; by a case study of the single PM bar, magnetic field lines division method is adopted to build the DPM, the starting point and section magnetic flux of each segment are solved, a comparison is made with finite element method (FEM) and measured data; the accuracy of this magnetic field line based distributed parameter model (MFDPM) in PM bar is verified; this model is applied to the electromagnetic system of a certain type EMR, electromagnetic system calculation model is established based on MFDPM, and the static force is calculated under different rotation angles; compared with traditional lumped parameter model and FEM, it proves to be of acceptable calculation accuracy and high calculation speed which fit the requirement of robust design.

The present paper introduces a novel method for the construction of sequences that have a zero-correlation zone. For the proposed sequence set, both the cross-correlation function and the side lobe of the autocorrelation function are zero for phase shifts within the zero-correlation zone. The proposed scheme can generate a set of sequences, each of length 16n2, from an arbitrary Hadamard matrix of order n and a set of 4n trigonometric function sequences of length 2n. The proposed construction can generate an optimal sequence set that satisfies, for a given zero-correlation zone and sequence period, the theoretical bound on the number of members. The peak factor of the proposed sequence set is equal to √2.

In this paper, we propose a new design technique called extit{asynchronous multi-frequency clocking} for suppressing EMI at a chip design level by combining two independent EMI-suppressing approaches: extit{multi-frequency clocking} and extit{asynchronous circuit design} techniques. To show the effectiveness of our approach, a five-stage pipelined asynchronous MIPS with multi-frequency clocking has been implemented on a commercial Xilinx FPGA device. Our approach shows 11.05 dB and 5.88 dB reductions of peak EM radiation in the prototyped implementation when compared to conventional synchronous and bundled-data asynchronous circuit counterparts, respectively.

This paper proposes an efficient two-scan labeling algorithm for binary hexagonal images. Unlike conventional labeling algorithms, which process pixels one by one in the first scan, our algorithm processes pixels two by two. We show that using our algorithm, we can check a smaller number of pixels. Experimental results demonstrated that our method is more efficient than the algorithm extended straightly from the corresponding labeling algorithm for rectangle binary images.

This paper presents an adaptive feedback canceller (AFC) based on a pseudo affine projection (PAP) algorithm that can provide fast and stable adaptation to the time-varying environment. The proposed algorithm utilizes the adaptive linear prediction (LP) to obtain the LP coefficients of input signal model and the inverse gain filter (IGF) to alleviate the effect of compensation gain. As a result, when the input is model as an AR signal, the proposed algorithm satisfies the condition for having an almost unbiased estimatie of the feedback path and then its performance is relatively independent of the gain setting of hearing aids. Simulation results showed that the proposed algorithm is capable of obtaining unbaised feedback path estimates and high speech quality.

An asymmetric zero correlation zone (A-ZCZ) sequence set is a type of ZCZ sequence set and consists of multiple sequence subsets. It is the most important property that is the cross-correlation function between arbitrary sequences belonging to different sequence subsets has quite a large zero-cross-correlation zone (ZCCZ). Our proposed A-ZCZ sequence sets can be constructed based on interleaved technique and orthogonality-preserving transformation by any perfect sequence of length P=Nq(2k+1) and Hadamard matrices of order T≥2, where N≥1, q≥1 and k≥1. If q=1, the novel sequence set is optimal ZCZ sequence set, which has parameters (TP,TN,2k+1) for all positive integers P=N(2k+1). The proposed A-ZCZ sequence sets have much larger ZCCZ, which are expected to be useful for designing spreading sequences for QS-CDMA systems.

Frequently interrupting someone who is busy will decrease his or her productivity. To minimize this risk, a number of interruptibility estimation methods based on PC activity such as typing or mouse clicks have been developed. However, these estimation methods do not take account of the effect of conversations in relation to the interruptibility of office workers engaged in intellectual activities such as scientific research. This study proposes an interruptibility estimation method that takes account of the conversation status. Two conversation indices, “In conversation” and “End of conversation” were used in a method that we developed based on our analysis of 50 hours worth of recorded activity. Experiments, using the conversation status as judged by the Wizard-of-OZ method, demonstrated that the estimation accuracy can be improved by the two indices. Furthermore, an automatic conversation status recognition system was developed to replace the Wizard-of-OZ procedure. The results of using it for interruptibility estimation suggest the effectiveness of the automatically recognized conversation status.

Chronic liver disease is a major worldwide health problem. Diagnosis and staging of chronic liver diseases is an important issue. In this paper, we propose a quantitative method of analyzing local morphological changes for accurate and practical computer-aided diagnosis of cirrhosis. Our method is based on sparse and low-rank matrix decomposition, since the matrix of the liver shapes can be decomposed into two parts: a low-rank matrix, which can be considered similar to that of a normal liver, and a sparse error term that represents the local deformation. Compared with the previous global morphological analysis strategy based on the statistical shape model (SSM), our proposed method improves the accuracy of both normal and abnormal classifications. We also propose using the norm of the sparse error term as a simple measure for classification as normal or abnormal. The experimental results of the proposed method are better than those of the state-of-the-art SSM-based methods.

This paper proposes a consistency maintenance scheme for P2P file sharing systems. The basic idea of the proposed scheme is to construct a static tree for each shared file to efficiently propagate the update information to all replica peers. The link to the root of the trees is acquired by referring to a Chord ring which stores the mapping from the set of shared files to the set of tree roots. The performance of the scheme is evaluated by simulation. The simulation result indicates that: 1) it reduces the number of messages in the Li's scheme by 54%, 2) it reduces the propagation delay of the scheme by more than 10%, and 3) the increase of the delay due to peer churns is effectively bounded provided that the percentage of leaving peers is less than 40%.

General purpose many-core architecture (MCA) such as GPGPU has recently been used widely to continue the performance scaling when the continuous increase in the working frequency has approached the manufacturing limitation. However, both the general purpose MCA and its building block general purpose processor (GPP) lack a tuning capability to boost energy efficiency for individual applications, especially computation intensive applications. As an alternative to the above MCA platforms, we propose in this paper our LAPP (Linear Array Pipeline) architecture, which takes a special-purpose reconfigurable structure for an optimal MIPS/W. However, we also keep the backward binary compatibility, which is not featured in most special hardware. More specifically, we used a general purpose VLIW processor, interpreting a commercial VLIW ISA, as the baseline frontend part to provide the backward binary compatibility. We also extended the functional unit (FU) stage into an FU array to form the reconfigurable backend for efficient execution of program hotspots to exploit parallelism. The hardware modules in this general purpose reconfigurable architecture have been locally zoned into several groups to apply preferable low-power techniques according to the module hardware features. Our results show that under a comparable performance, the tightly coupled general/special purpose hardware, which is based on a 180nm cell library, can achieve 10.8 times the MIPS/W of MCA architecture of the same technology features. When a 65 technology node is assumed, a similar 9.4x MIPS/W can be achieved by using the LAPP without changing program binaries.

Maximally flat digital differentiators (MFDDs) are widely used in many applications. By using MFDDs, we obtain the derivative of an input signal with high accuracy around their center frequency of flat property. Moreover, to avoid the influence of noise, it is desirable to attenuate the magnitude property of MFDDs expect for the vicinity of the center frequency. In this paper, we introduce a design method of linear phase FIR band-pass MFDDs with an arbitrary center frequency. The proposed transfer function for both of TYPE III and TYPE IV can be achieved as a closed form function using Jacobi polynomial. Furthermore, we can easily derive the weighting coefficients of the proposed MFDDs using recursive formula. Through some design examples, we confirm that the proposed method can adjust the center frequency arbitrarily and the band width having flat property.

Although multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MI-MO) systems provide high data rate transmission, they may suffer from interference. Block diagonalization and eigenbeam-space division multiplexing (E-SDM) can suppress interference. The transmitter needs to determine beamforming weights from channel state information (CSI) to use these techniques. However, MIMO channels change in time-varying environments during the time intervals between when transmission parameters are determined and actual MIMO transmission occurs. The outdated CSI causes interference and seriously degrades the quality of transmission. Channel prediction schemes have been developed to mitigate the effects of outdated CSI. We evaluated the accuracy of prediction of autoregressive (AR)-model-based prediction and Lagrange extrapolation in the presence of channel estimation error. We found that Lagrange extrapolation was easy to implement and that it provided performance comparable to that obtained with the AR-model-based technique.

Because of the popularity of rich content, such as video files, the amount of traffic on the Internet continues to grow every year. Not only is the overall traffic increasing, but also the temporal fluctuations in traffic are increasing, and differences in the amounts of traffic between peak and off-peak periods are becoming very large. Consequently, efficient use of link bandwidth is becoming more challenging. In this paper, we propose a new system for content distribution: storage aware routing (SAR). With SAR, routers having large storage capacities can exploit those links that are underutilized. Our performance evaluations show that SAR can smooth the fluctuations in link utilization.

We consider single and multiple attacker scenarios in guessing and obtain bounds on various success parameters in terms of Renyi entropies. We also obtain a new derivation of the union bound.