A vertex subset I of a graph G is called a k-path vertex cover if every path on k vertices in G contains at least one vertex from I. The K-PATH VERTEX COVER RECONFIGURATION (K-PVCR) problem asks if one can transform one k-path vertex cover into another via a sequence of k-path vertex covers where each intermediate member is obtained from its predecessor by applying a given reconfiguration rule exactly once. We investigate the computational complexity of K-PVCR from the viewpoint of graph classes under the well-known reconfiguration rules: TS, TJ, and TAR. The problem for k=2, known as the VERTEX COVER RECONFIGURATION (VCR) problem, has been well-studied in the literature. We show that certain known hardness results for VCR on different graph classes can be extended for K-PVCR. In particular, we prove a complexity dichotomy for K-PVCR on general graphs: on those whose maximum degree is three (and even planar), the problem is PSPACE-complete, while on those whose maximum degree is two (i.e., paths and cycles), the problem can be solved in polynomial time. Additionally, we also design polynomial-time algorithms for K-PVCR on trees under each of TJ and TAR. Moreover, on paths, cycles, and trees, we describe how one can construct a reconfiguration sequence between two given k-path vertex covers in a yes-instance. In particular, on paths, our constructed reconfiguration sequence is shortest.

Parallel computing essentially consists of computation and communication and, in many cases, communication performance is vital. Many parallel applications use collective communications, which often dominate the performance of the parallel execution. This paper focuses on collective communication performance to speed-up the parallel execution. This paper firstly offers our experimental result that splitting a session of collective communication to small portions (slices) possibly enables efficient communication. Then, based on the results, this paper proposes a new concept cup-stacking with a genetic algorithm based methodology. The preliminary evaluation results reveal the effectiveness of the proposed method.

We propose a novel synthetic-benchmarks generation model using partial time-series regression, called Partial-Regression-Integrated Generic Model (PRIGM). PRIGM abstracts the unique characteristics of the input sensor data into generic time-series data confirming the generation similarity and evaluating the correctness of the synthetic benchmarks. The experimental results obtained by the proposed model with its formula verify that PRIGM preserves the time-series characteristics of empirical data in complex time-series data within 10.4% on an average difference in terms of descriptive statistics accuracy.

In recent years, Graph Neural Networks has received enormous attention from academia for its huge potential of modeling the network traits such as macrostructure and single node attributes. However, prior mainstream works mainly focus on homogeneous network and lack the capacity to characterize the network heterogeneous property. Besides, most previous literature cannot the model latent influence link under microscope vision, making it infeasible to model the joint relation between the heterogeneity and mutual interaction within multiple relation type. In this letter, we propose a latent influence based self-attention framework to address the difficulties mentioned above. To model the heterogeneity and mutual interactions, we redesign the attention mechanism with latent influence factor on single-type relation level, which learns the importance coefficient from its adjacent neighbors under the same meta-path based patterns. To incorporate the heterogeneous meta-path in a unified dimension, we developed a novel self-attention based framework for meta-path relation fusion according to the learned meta-path coefficient. Our experimental results demonstrate that our framework not only achieves higher results than current state-of-the-art baselines, but also shows promising vision on depicting heterogeneous interactive relations under complicated network structure.

To alleviate the problem of the dependency on the quantity of the training sample data in speech emotion recognition, a weighted gradient pre-train algorithm for low-resource speech emotion recognition is proposed. Multiple public emotion corpora are used for pre-training to generate shared hidden layer (SHL) parameters with the generalization ability. The parameters are used to initialize the downsteam network of the recognition task for the low-resource dataset, thereby improving the recognition performance on low-resource emotion corpora. However, the emotion categories are different among the public corpora, and the number of samples varies greatly, which will increase the difficulty of joint training on multiple emotion datasets. To this end, a weighted gradient (WG) algorithm is proposed to enable the shared layer to learn the generalized representation of different datasets without affecting the priority of the emotion recognition on each corpus. Experiments show that the accuracy is improved by using CASIA, IEMOCAP, and eNTERFACE as the known datasets to pre-train the emotion models of GEMEP, and the performance could be improved further by combining WG with gradient reversal layer.

This paper proposes a novel multi-layer substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) resonator loaded with asymmetric E-shaped slot-lines and shows a tri-band band-pass filter (BPF) using the proposed structure. In the previous literature, various SIW resonators have been proposed to simultaneously solve the problems of large area and high insertion loss. Although these SIWs have a lower insertion loss than planar-type resonators using a printed circuit board, the size of these structures tends to be larger. A multi-layer SIW resonator loaded with asymmetric E-shaped slot-lines can solve the above problems and realize a tri-band BPF without increasing the size to realize further miniaturization. The theoretical design method and the structural design are shown. Moreover, the configured structure is fabricated and measured for showing the validity of the design method in this paper.

Sparse code division multiple access (SCMA) is a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technology that can improve frequency band utilization and allow many users to share quite a few resource elements (REs). This paper uses the modulation of lattice theory to develop a systematic construction procedure for the design of SCMA codebooks under Gaussian channel environments that can achieve near-optimal designs, especially for cases that consider large-scale SCMA parameters. However, under the condition of large-scale SCMA parameters, the mother constellation (MC) points will overlap, which can be solved by the method of the partial dimensions transformation (PDT). More importantly, we consider the upper bounded error probability of the signal transmission in the AWGN channels, and design a codeword allocation method to reduce the inter symbol interference (ISI) on the same RE. Simulation results show that under different codebook sizes and different overload rates, using two different message passing algorithms (MPA) to verify, the codebook proposed in this paper has a bit error rate (BER) significantly better than the reference codebooks, moreover the convergence time does not exceed that of the reference codebooks.

Cryptocurrency abuse has become a critical problem. Due to the anonymous nature of cryptocurrency, criminals commonly adopt cryptocurrency for trading drugs and deceiving people without revealing their identities. Despite its significance and severity, only few works have studied how cryptocurrency has been abused in the real world, and they only provide some limited measurement results. Thus, to provide a more in-depth understanding on the cryptocurrency abuse cases, we present a large-scale analysis on various Bitcoin abuse types using 200,507 real-world reports collected by victims from 214 countries. We scrutinize observable abuse trends, which are closely related to real-world incidents, to understand the causality of the abuses. Furthermore, we investigate the semantics of various cryptocurrency abuse types to show that several abuse types overlap in meaning and to provide valuable insight into the public dataset. In addition, we delve into abuse channels to identify which widely-known platforms can be maliciously deployed by abusers following the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. Consequently, we demonstrate the polarization property of Bitcoin addresses practically utilized on transactions, and confirm the possible usage of public report data for providing clues to track cyber threats. We expect that this research on Bitcoin abuse can empirically reach victims more effectively than cybercrime, which is subject to professional investigation.

The increasing amount of fake news is a growing problem that will progressively worsen in our interconnected world. Machine learning, particularly deep learning, is being used to detect misinformation; however, the models employed are essentially black boxes, and thus are uninterpretable. This paper presents an overview of explainable fake news detection models. Specifically, we first review the existing models, datasets, evaluation techniques, and visualization processes. Subsequently, possible improvements in this field are identified and discussed.

We consider a regulation problem for an uncertain chain of integrators with an unknown time-varying delay in the input. To deal with uncertain parameters and unknown delay, we propose an adaptive event-triggered controller with a dynamic gain. We show that the system is globally regulated and interexecution times are lower bounded. Moreover, we show that these lower bounds can be enlarged by adjusting a control parameter. An example is given for clear illustration.

Due to the significant difference in speed between the user terminals (UTs) and the low earth orbit (LEO) satellites, it is necessary to solve the frequent handover of UTs at the edge of the moving satellite beams. Besides, as the development of LEO satellite communications, the scale of constellations and the number of UTs undergoing massive increase. Thus, in this paper, a satellite handover strategy is proposed to improve the handover performances of UTs and satellites. We define the utility function of handover jointly by considering the quality of experience of UTs, the throughput of satellites and the load balancing of network. Then, a coding method is proposed to represent the combinations of UTs and satellites. To reduce the calculational cost, an access and handover strategy based on a heuristic algorithm is proposed to search the optimal handover result. Finally, simulations show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed strategy.

This brief proposes a solar-cell-assisted wireless biosensing system that operates using a biofuel cell (BFC). To facilitate BFC area reduction for the use of this system in area-constrained continuous glucose monitoring contact lenses, an energy harvester combined with an on-chip solar cell is introduced as a dedicated power source for the transmitter. A dual-oscillator-based supply voltage monitor is employed to convert the BFC output into digital codes. From measurements of the test chip fabricated in 65-nm CMOS technology, the proposed system can achieve 99% BFC area reduction.

Recently, with the spread of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, embedded hardware devices have been used in a variety of everyday electrical items. Due to the increased demand for embedded hardware devices, some of the IC design and manufacturing steps have been outsourced to third-party vendors. Since malicious third-party vendors may insert malicious circuits, called hardware Trojans, into their products, developing an effective hardware-Trojan detection method is strongly required. In this paper, we propose 25 hardware-Trojan features focusing on the structure of trigger circuits for machine-learning-based hardware-Trojan detection. Combining the proposed features into 11 existing hardware-Trojan features, we totally utilize 36 hardware-Trojan features for classification. Then we classify the nets in an unknown netlist into a set of normal nets and Trojan nets based on a random-forest classifier. The experimental results demonstrate that the average true positive rate (TPR) becomes 64.2% and the average true negative rate (TNR) becomes 100.0%. They improve the average TPR by 14.8 points while keeping the average TNR compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. In particular, the proposed method successfully finds out Trojan nets in several benchmark circuits, which are not found by the existing method.

Low-hit-zone frequency-hopping sequences (LHZ-FHSs) are frequency-hopping sequences with low Hamming correlation in a low-hit-zone (LHZ), which have important applications in quasi-synchronous communication systems. However, the strict quasi-synchronization may be hard to maintain at all times in practical FHMA networks, it is also necessary to minimize the Hamming correlation for time-shifts outside of the LHZ. The main objective of this letter is to propose a lower bound on the maximum correlation magnitude outside the low-hit-zone for LHZ-FHS sets. It turns out that the proposed bound is tight or almost tight in the sense that it can be achieved by some LHZ-FHS sets.

This paper proposes novel test techniques for high accuracy measurement of ADCs and a ramp generator on a CMOS image sensor (CIS) chip. The test circuit for the ADCs has a dual path and has an ability of multi-functional fine pattern generator that can define any input for each column to evaluate CIS specific characteristics electrically. The test circuit for the ramp generator can realize an on-chip current cell test and reject the current cell failure within 1LSB accuracy. We fabricated the test sensor using 55nm CIS process and measured the IP characteristics. Measured results show INL of 14.6LSB, crosstalk of 14.9LSB and column interference noise of 5.4LSB. These measured results agree with the designed values. By using this technique, we confirmed the accurate ADC measurement can be realized without being affected by the ambiguity of the optical input.

As known to us all, L-shaped co-prime array (LCA) is a recently introduced two-dimensional (2-D) sparse array structure, which is extended from linear co-prime array (CA). Such sparse array geometry can be used for 2-D parameters estimation with higher degrees-of-freedom (DOF). However, in the scenario where several narrowband transmissions spread over a wide spectrum, existing technique based on LCA with Nyquist sampling may encounter a bottleneck for both analog and digital processing. To alleviate the burden of high-rate Nyquist sampling, a method of joint wideband spectrum and direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation with compressed sampling based on LCA, which is recognized as LCA-based modulated wideband converter (MWC), is presented in this work. First, the received signal along each antenna is mixed to basebands, low-pass filtered and down-sampled to get the compressed sampling data. Then by constructing the virtual received data of 2-D difference coarray, we estimate the wideband spectrum and DOA jointly using two recovery methods where the first is a joint ESPRIT method and the other is a joint CS method. Numerical simulations illustrate the validity of the proposed LCA based MWC system and show the superiority.

Intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) have been extensively studied in recent years to improve the safety and efficiency of transportation. The use of a radar system to enable the ITSs monitor the environment is robust to weather conditions and is less invasive to user privacy. Moreover, equipping the roadside units (RSUs) with radar modules has been deemed an economical and efficient option for ITS operators. However, because the detection and tracking parameters can significantly influence the radar system performance and the best parameters for different scenarios are different, the selection of appropriate parameters for the radar systems is critical. In this study, we investigated radar parameter selection and consequently proposes a parameter selection approach capable of automatically choosing the appropriate detection and tracking parameters for radar systems. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method realizes appropriate selection of parameters, thereby significantly improving the detection and tracking performance of radar systems.

Optical phase conjugation (OPC) is an all-optical signal processing technique for mitigating fiber nonlinearity and is promising for building cost-efficient fiber networks with few optic-electric-optic conversions and long amplification spacing. In lumped amplified systems, OPC has a little nonlinearity mitigation efficiency for nonlinear distortion induced by cross-phase modulation (XPM) due to the asymmetry of power and chromatic dispersion (CD) maps during propagation in transmission fiber. In addition, the walk-off of XPM-induced noise becomes small due to the CD compensation effect of OPC, so the deterministic nonlinear distortion increases. Therefore, lumped amplified transmission systems with OPC are more sensitive to channel spacing than conventional systems. In this paper, we show the channel spacing dependence of NZ-DSF transmission using amplification repeater with OPC. Numerical simulations show comprehensive characteristics between channel spacing and CD in a 100-Gbps/λ WDM signal. An experimental verification using periodically poled LiNbO3-based OPC is also performed. These results suggest that channel spacing design is more important in OPC-assisted systems than in conventional dispersion-unmanaged systems.

This letter presents an innovative solution for real-time interaction during online classes. Synchronous sharing enables instructors to provide real-time feedback to students. This encourages students to stay focused and feel engaged during class. Consequently, students evaluated anonymously that this solution significantly enhanced their learning experience during real-time online classes.

This letter presents a new framework for synchronous remote online exams. This framework proposes new monitoring of notebooks in remote locations and limited messaging only enabled between students and their instructor during online exams. This framework was evaluated by students as highly effective in minimizing cheating during online exams.