With the progress of ubiquitous technology, ubiquitous learning presents new opportunities to learners. Situations of a learner can be grasped through analyzing the learner's actions collected by sensors, RF-IDs, or cameras in order to provide support at proper time, proper place, and proper situation. Training for acquiring skills and enhancing physical abilities through exercise and experience in the real world is an important domain in u-learning. A training program may last for several days and has one or more training units (exercises) for a day. A learner's performance in a unit is considered as short term state. The performance in a series of units may change with patterns: progress, plateau, and decline. Long term state in a series of units is accumulatively computed based on short term states. In a learning/training program, it is necessary to apply different support strategies to adapt to different states of the learner. Adaptation in learning support is significant, because a learner loses his/her interests easily without adaptation. Systems with the adaptive support usually provide stimulators to a learner, and a learner can have a great motivation in learning at beginning. However, when the stimulators reach some levels, the learner may lose his/her motivation, because the long term state of the learner changes dynamically, which means a progress state may change to a plateau state or a decline state. In different long term learning states, different types of stimulators are needed. However, the stimulators and advice provided by the existing systems are monotonic without changeable support strategies. We propose a mutual adaptive support. The mutual adaptation means each of the system and the learner has their own states. On one hand, the system tries to change its state to adapt to the learner's state for providing adaptive support. On the other hand, the learner can change its performance following the advice given based on the state of the system. We create a ubiquitous pet (u-pet) as a metaphor of our system. A u-pet is always with the learner and encourage the leaner to start training at proper time and to do training smoothly. The u-pet can perform actions with the learner in training, change its own attributes based on the learner's attributes, and adjust its own learning rate by a learning function. The u-pet grasps the state of the learner and adopts different training support strategies to the learner's training based on the learner's short and long term states.

This paper presents an agent-based system for building and operating context-aware services in public spaces, including museums. The system provides users with agents and detects the locations of users and deploys location-aware user-assistant agents at computers near the their current locations by using active RFID-tags. When a visitor moves between exhibits in a museum, this dynamically deploys his/her agent at the computers close to the exhibits by using mobile agent technology. It annotates the exhibits in his/her personalized form and navigate him/her user to the next exhibits along his/her routes. It also introduces user movement as a natural approach to interacting between users and agents. To demonstrate the utility and effectiveness of the system, we constructed location/user-aware visitor-guide services and experimented them for two weeks in a public museum.

A novel modal signal decoupling algorithm for multi-coupled transmission lines is developed. Since the proposed method exploits a set of basis vectors associated with the characteristic impedances of the transmission line system, these multi-coupled signals can be efficiently decoupled regardless of dielectric media and conductors. Thus, compact forms of the signal integrity verification CAD models for multi-coupled transmission lines can be readily determined. It is shown that the analytical models are in excellent agreement with those obtained with SPICE simulation and its computation time is much faster than the conventional macro model (W-model) in the order of two.

The purpose of this study is to show a class of near shift-invariant and orientation-selective transform based on even-stacked cosine-modulated filter banks (ECFBs) which originally have been proposed by Lin and Vaidyanathan. It is well-known that ECFBs can be designed by the modulation of just one prototype filter and guarantee the linear phase property. We extend this class to delay-less oversampled ECFB and show two additional attractive features; high directional selectivity and near shift-invariant property. In this paper, these properties are verified by theoretical analysis and demonstrations.

Low noise terahertz (THz) receivers based on superconducting niobium nitride (NbN) hot electron bolometer (HEB) mixers have been designed, fabricated and measured for applications in astronomy and cosmology. The NbN HEB mixer consists of a planar antenna and an NbN bridge connecting across the antenna's inner terminals on a high-resistivity Si substrate. To eliminate the influence of direct detection and instability of the local oscillation (LO) power, a wire grid has been used to change the input LO power for compensating the shift of bias current during Y-factor measurement. The double sideband (DSB) receiver noise temperatures at 4.2 K without corrections have been measured from 0.65 to 3.1 THz. The excess quantum noise factor β of about 4 has been obtained, which agrees well with the calculated value. Allan variance of the HEB has been characterized, and Allan time TA longer than 0.4 s is obtained. We also estimated the temperature resolution of the HEB from the Allan variance and obtained the minimum temperature resolution of 1.1 K using a Gunn oscillator with its multipliers at 0.65 THz as an LO source.

This paper presents hybrid type-II automatic repeat request (H-ARQ) for wireless wearable body area networks (BANs) based on ultra wideband (UWB) technology. The proposed model is based on three schemes, namely, high rate optimized rate compatible punctured convolutional codes (HRO-RCPC), Reed Solomon (RS) invertible codes and their concatenation. Forward error correction (FEC) coding is combined with simple cyclic redundancy check (CRC) error detection. The performance is investigated for two channels: CM3 (on-body to on-body) and CM4 (on-body to a gateway) scenarios of the IEEE802.15.6 BAN channel models for BANs. It is shown that the improvement in performance in terms of throughput and error protection robustness is very significant. Thus, the proposed H-ARQ schemes can be employed and optimized to suit medical and non-medical applications. In particular we propose the use of FEC coding for non-medical applications as those require less stringent quality of service (QoS), while the incremental redundancy and ARQ configuration is utilized only for medical applications. Thus, higher QoS is guaranteed for medical application of BANs while allowing coexistence with non-medical applications.

This letter proposes a wakeup-on-demand scheme based on the idea that a device should be awakened just when it has to receive a packet from a neighboring device. To prove this scheme, this letter proposes a mathematical model based on the busy cycle of M/G/1 queuing systems to obtain a battery lifetime of one-hop cluster-topology shaped W-WSN.

In this letter, a novel technique for fast block matching using a new matching criterion is proposed. The matching speed and image quality are controlled by the one control parameter called matching region ratio. An efficient matching scheme with a gradual voting strategy is also proposed. This scheme can greatly boost the matching speed. The proposed technique is fast and applicable even in the presence of speckle noise or partial occlusion.

In this letter, we develop an anycast-based emergency service for healthcare wireless sensor networks. The new service could operate with sensors to detect and activate an alarm system based on predefined conditions that are specific to the patient and the disease. The new service is implemented on 802.15.4 ZigBee which usually has large control overhead and long transmission times. To improve the service performance, our service identifies the closest emergency service provider to alleviate the control overhead and achieve immediate assistance when a patient requests for an emergency service. We also increase the reliability of packet transmission by using a Recovery Point scheme. Our simulations and experiment demonstrate that our scheme is efficient and feasible for healthcare wireless sensor networks.

Output voltage regulation problem of DC-DC boost power converters is studied based on an averaged model with a practical inductor. This paper exploits the effect of inductor's parasitic resistance on the performance of an existing parallel-damped (PD) passivity-based controller (PBC) under load variations. As an attempt to apply the passivity-based framework to the converter with parasitic resistance we have combined a new proportional-integral (PI) controller with the PBC. Simulation results show that the combined (PBC and PI) dynamic output feedback controller successfully achieves the performance improvement under reference step changes and load variations.

The IEEE 802.15.4a standard enables geographical routing in ZigBee networks but previous geographical routing algorithms can suffer high packet loss due to the interference effects. This letter proposes an interference-aware energy-efficient geographical routing algorithm for the IEEE 802.15.4a networks. The proposed algorithm estimates the energy cost by considering the interference effects and forwards a packet to the neighbor with the lowest energy cost to advance. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the previous algorithms in terms of the delivery ratio and the energy consumption.

MIMO-OFDM systems aim to improve transmission quality and/or throughput but require significant signal processing capability and flexibility at reasonable cost. This paper proposes a reconfigurable architecture and associated algorithm optimizations for these types of systems based on the IEEE 802.11n and IEEE 802.16e standards. In particular, we describe the implementation of two key computations onto this architecture, namely Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and Space-Time Block Decoding (STBD). The design is post-layout using a UMC 0.18 micron technology at a clock rate of 100 MHz. Performance comparisons with other optimization methods and hardware implementations are given.

Ray tracing is one of the most popular techniques for generating photo-realistic images. Extensive research and development work has made interactive static scene rendering realistic. This paper deals with interactive dynamic scene rendering in which not only the eye point but also the objects in the scene change their 3D locations every frame. In order to realize interactive dynamic scene rendering, RTRPS (Ray Tracing based on Ray Plane and Bounding Sphere), which utilizes the coherency in rays, objects, and grouped-rays, is introduced. RTRPS uses bounding spheres as the spatial data structure which utilizes the coherency in objects. By using bounding spheres, RTRPS can ignore the rotation of moving objects within a sphere, and shorten the update time between frames. RTRPS utilizes the coherency in rays by merging rays into a ray-plane, assuming that the secondary rays and shadow rays are shot through an aligned grid. Since a pair of ray-planes shares an original ray, the intersection for the ray can be completed using the coherency in the ray-planes. Because of the three kinds of coherency, RTRPS can significantly reduce the number of intersection tests for ray tracing. Further acceleration techniques for ray-plane-sphere and ray-triangle intersection are also presented. A parallel projection technique converts a 3D vector inner product operation into a 2D operation and reduces the number of floating point operations. Techniques based on frustum culling and binary-tree structured ray-planes optimize the order of intersection tests between ray-planes and a sphere, resulting in 50% to 90% reduction of intersection tests. Two ray-triangle intersection techniques are also introduced, which are effective when a large number of rays are packed into a ray-plane. Our performance evaluations indicate that RTRPS gives 13 to 392 times speed up in comparison with a ray tracing algorithm without organized rays and spheres. We found out that RTRPS also provides competitive performance even if only primary rays are used.

This paper presents a domain-ontology driven multi-agent based scheme for representing the knowledge of the communication network management system. In the proposed knowledge-intensive framework, the static domain-related concepts are articulated as the domain knowledge ontology. The experiential knowledge for managing the network is represented as the fault-case reasoning models, and it is explicitly encoded as the core knowledge of multi-agent middleware layer as heuristic production-type rules. These task-oriented management expertise manipulates the domain content and structure during the diagnostic sessions. The agents' rules along with the embedded generic java-based problem-solving algorithms and run-time log information, perform the automated management tasks. For the proof of concept, an experimental network system has been implemented in our laboratory, and the deployment of some test-bed scenarios is performed. Experimental results confirm a marked reduction in the management-overhead of the network administrator, as compared to the manual network management techniques, in terms of the time-taken and effort-done during a particular fault-diagnosis session. Validation of the reusability/modifiability aspects of our system, illustrates the flexible manipulation of the knowledge fragments within diverse application contexts. The proposed approach can be regarded as one of the pioneered steps towards representing the network knowledge via reusable domain ontology and intelligent agents for the automated network management support systems.

A design of the tunable superconducting power filter is described. The filter consists of superconducting microwave cavities with a mechanical tuning method. The electromagnetic simulations using niobium cavity suggested that there were conditions where the resonator with high-unloaded Q can realize a fractional center frequency change of more than 10% by using a Nb rod moving in the cavity. The simulations approximated the resonant frequency dependence of the rod moved by a cryogenic actuator in the tunable cavity experiment. In addition, the simulation of the power handling capability showed a feasibility of the value more than 50 dBW.

This paper proposes the sleep stage estimation method that can provide an accurate estimation for each person without connecting any devices to human's body. In particular, our method learns the appropriate multiple band-pass filters to extract the specific wave pattern of heartbeat, which is required to estimate the sleep stage. For an accurate estimation, this paper employs Learning Classifier System (LCS) as the data-mining techniques and extends it to estimate the sleep stage. Extensive experiments on five subjects in mixed health confirm the following implications: (1) the proposed method can provide more accurate sleep stage estimation than the conventional method, and (2) the sleep stage estimation calculated by the proposed method is robust regardless of the physical condition of the subject.

In this letter, a statistical uncorrelated near class discriminant (SUNCD) approach is proposed for face recognition. The optimal discriminant vector obtained by this approach can differentiate one class and its near classes, i.e., its nearest neighbor classes, by constructing the specific between-class and within-class scatter matrices and using the Fisher criterion. In this manner, SUNCD acquires all discriminant vectors class by class. Furthermore, SUNCD makes every discriminant vector satisfy locally statistical uncorrelated constraints by using the corresponding class and part of its most neighboring classes. Experiments on the public AR face database demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms several representative discriminant methods.

In this paper, we propose a novel target acoustic signal detection approach which is based on non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). Target basis vectors are trained from the target signal database through NMF, and input vectors are projected onto the subspace spanned by these target basis vectors. By analyzing the distribution of time-varying normalized projection error, the optimal threshold can be calculated to detect the target signal intervals during the entire input signal. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can detect the target signal successfully under various signal environments.

In this paper, we propose a novel Web service composition framework which dynamically accommodates various failure recovery requirements. In the proposed framework called Adaptive Failure-handling Framework (AdaFF), failure-handling submodules are prepared during the design of a composite service, and some of them are systematically selected and automatically combined with the composite Web service at service instantiation in accordance with the requirement of individual users. In contrast, existing frameworks cannot adapt the failure-handling behaviors to user's requirements. AdaFF rapidly delivers a composite service supporting the requirement-matched failure handling without manual development, and contributes to a flexible composite Web service design in that service architects never care about failure handling or variable requirements of users. For proof of concept, we implement a prototype system of the AdaFF, which automatically generates a composite service instance with Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) according to the users' requirement specified in XML format and executes the generated instance on the ActiveBPEL engine.

We propose a proof-of-concept of a switchable multi-frequency MMIC (monolithic microwave integrated circuit) oscillator device, operating in the 60 GHz millimeter wave band, which is implemented in GaAs p-HEMT transistor technology. Oscillators that can switch between two frequencies have been designed, fabricated and evaluated. The oscillator uses a cross-coupled FET topology, combined with a bent asymmetric coplanar stripline for the resonator, and a switched-capacitor for the frequency switching components. The oscillator generates two oscillations at f/2 and f where f is the target frequency of around 60 GHz. The switchable oscillator has been demonstrated for the range of frequency from 44 GHz to 68.9 GHz. Moreover, the designed oscillator exhibits a wide-band negative resistance property that allows fabricating switchable oscillators covering the 50 to 75 GHz V-band. An evaluated switchable oscillator delivers -17.09 dBm and -13.72 dBm output power at 62.45 GHz and 64.78 GHz, for a supplied power of 40.6 mW and 39.1 mW, respectively.