Saltiness elicited by salt is one of the basic tastes. However, components of salt on the market differ depending on manufacturing processes and its taste as well. Salt manufactured by ion-exchange membrane process is composed of more than 99% pure sodium chloride, while bay salt contains trace coexisting components. Despite reports on sensory evaluation, the differences in taste are still uncertain because of a small amount of coexisting components. We studied the taste of salt with trace coexisting components; the bittern ("nigari" in Japanese) was evaluated objectively and quantitatively using a multichannel taste sensor with lipid/polymer membranes. A taste sensor is comprised of several types of lipid/polymer membranes for transforming information of taste substances into electric signals. The model samples were composed of sodium chloride and trace coexisting components such as magnesium sulfate, magnesium chloride, calcium chloride and sodium chloride. The taste sensor clearly discriminated each sample according to the response patterns. Based on the sensor outputs, we evaluated the taste by means of the combination of principal component analysis and ionic strength. The results show the taste of salt with nigari has a correlation with ionic strength.

There are methods used to test the optical purity of enantiomers; however, most of the simple methods are not precise and more complicated methods are better. As a result, these methods cannot be widely used for industrial purposes. The aim of this research is to design a sensor which can discriminate D-amino acids from L-amino acids. The designed sensor has chiral membranes and uses the technique of impedance change of these chiral membranes to discriminate the amino acids. We used a noise-FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) technique to determine the membrane impedance. When an enantiomer membrane resides in a chiral environment, (E*), diastereomeric interactions (E*-D) and (E*-L) are created, which may differ sufficiently in the arrangement of molecules of the membranes so as to permit the discrimination of optical substances due to the change in membrane characteristics. With increasing concentrations of the amino acids, the membrane resistance changes depended on the optical activity of the amino acids. The results suggest that the impedance changes of the chiral membrane with diastereomeric reaction can be used for the high-performance chemical sensor to measure the optical purity of different substances.

The sign-language can be used as a communication means between avatars having no common language. As a trial to overcome the linguistic barrier, we have previously developed a 2D model-based sign-language chatting system between Korean and Japanese on the the Internet. In that system, there have been some problems to be solved for natural animation and real-time transmission. In this paper, we employ a 3D character model for stereoscopic gestures in the sign-language animation. We also utilize CG animation techniques which use the variable number of frames and a cubic spline interpolation in order to generate realistic gestures. For real-time communication, on the other hand, we make use of an intelligent communication method on a client-server architecture. We implement a preliminary communication system with Visual C++ 5.0 and Open Inventor on Windows platforms. Experimental results show a possibility that the system could be used for avatar communications between different languages.

We propose a device called the Waveguide width abruptly EXpanded Spot-Size-Converter integrated Laser Diode (WEX-SSC-LD) that has been designed to improve lasing characteristics by achieving a steep photoluminescence wavelength change along the cavity. The waveguide parameter was optimized by a three-dimensional beam propagation method to reduce mode conversion and absorption losses. The WEX-SSC-LD's showed superior lasing characteristics such as threshold currents of 5.8 mA at 25C and 19 mA at 85C and operation current of 57.5 mA at an output power of 10 mW for 85C. These excellent lasing characteristics were achieved due to the steeper bandgap-energy shift in the SSC section near the LD section side by introducing the WEX-SSC structure as well as the high-quality MQW active layer grown by selective MOVPE and the precisely controlled pn-pn current blocking structure. The coupling loss to normal single-mode fiber was as low as 1.8 dB while maintaining a large coupling tolerance of 1.8 µm. These excellent coupling characteristics are very promising for passively aligned optical modules.

We propose a new active vision system that mimics a saccadic movement of human eye. It is implemented based on a new computational model using neural networks. In this model, the visual pathway was divided in order to categorize a saccadic eye movement into three parts, each of which was then individually modeled using different neural networks to reflect a principal functionality of brain structures related with the saccadic eye movement in our brain. Initially, the visual cortex for saccadic eye movements was modeled using a self-organizing feature map, then a modified learning vector quantization network was applied to imitate the activity of the superior colliculus relative to a visual stimulus. In addition, a multilayer recurrent neural network, which is learned by an evolutionary computation algorithm, was used to model the visual pathway from the superior colliculus to the oculomotor neurons. Results from a computer simulation show that the proposed computational model is effective in mimicking the human eye movements during a saccade. Based on the proposed model, an active vision system using a CCD type camera and motor system was developed and demonstrated with experimental results.

For FA (factory automation) and ATE (automatic test equipment) in the industrial area, the standard bus is required to increase the system performance of multiprocessor environment. VME (versa module european package format) bus is appropriated to the standard bus but has the features that is the small of package and the low density of board. Beside, the density of board and semiconductor have grown to become a significant issues that affect the development time, project cost and field diagnostics. To fit this trend, in this paper, the author composed Revision C. 1 (IEEE Std. P1014-1987) of the integrated environment for the main function such as arbitration, interrupt and interface between VMEbus and several control modules. Also the designed VME system controller is implemented on FPGA that can be located even into Slot 1. The control and function modules are coded with VHDL mid-fixed description method and then those operations are verified by simulation. As a result of experiment, the author confirmed that the most important about the operation of Bus timer that Bus error signal should occur within 56 µs, and both control and function modules have the reciprocal operation correctly. Thus, the constructed VHDL library will be able to apply the system based VMEbus and ASIC design.

When a failure or upset occurring in a controller computer induces a task failure durable for a substantial period, system dynamics apparently deviates from its desirable sample paths, and loses its stability in an extreme case for the period to exceed the hard deadline in a real-time control system. In the paper, we propose an algorithm to combine the deadlines of all elementary tasks (derived formerly by our work) executed in several operation modes with multi-sampling periods. This results in computing the hard deadline of the entire system through modifying task-state equations to capture the effects of task failures and inter-correlations among tasks.

We propose a novel adaptive multiple-symbol differential detection (MSDD) scheme that has excellent performance over frequency selective fading (FSF) channels. The adaptive MSDD scheme consists of an adaptive noncoherent least mean square channel estimator that can accomplish channel estimation without any decision delay and the MSDD. The M-algorithm is introduced into this detection scheme to reduce the complication of computation due to increasing observed sequence length in the MSDD. Because of the application of the adaptive channel estimator and the M-algorithm, this adaptive MSDD make it possible that channel estimation is accomplished for every symbol along M surviving paths without any decision delay. And the SER performance of this adaptive MSDD is not affected by phase fluctuation introduced by a channel because the MSDD and the noncoherent channel estimator are applied. The adaptive MSDD scheme is applied to typical constellation of 16APSK, the (4,12) QAM and the star QAM. The excellent tracking performance of this adaptive MSDD scheme over FSF channels is confirmed by computer simulations.

This paper describes an oversampling data recovery circuit composed of an analog delay locked loop and a digital decision logic. The novel oversampling technique is based on the delay locked loop circuit locked to multiple clock periods rather than a single clock period, which generates the timing resolution less than the gate delay of the delay chain. The digital logic for data recovery was implemented with the assumption that there is no frequency deviation that hurts the center of acquired data. The chip has been fabricated using 0.6 µm CMOS technology. The chip has been tested at 1.0 Gb/s NRZ input data with 125 MHz clock and recovers the serial input data into eight 125 Mb/s output stream.

Reconfiguration of memory arrays using spare lines is known to be an NP-complete problem. In this paper, we present an algorithm that reconfigures a memory array without any faults by using spare lines effectively even if they contain faulty elements. First, the reconfiguration problem is transformed to an equivalent covering problem in which faulty elements are covered by imaginary fault-free spare lines. Next, the covering problem is heuristically solved by using the Dulmange-Mendelsohn decomposition. The experiments for recently designed memory arrays show that the proposed algorithm is fast and practical.

All the existing scheduling algorithms order the instructions of the program in such a way that it can be executed in minimal time only for one fixed number of processors. In this paper we propose a new scheduling method, called Parallelism-Independent Scheduling Method, which enables the execution of the scheduled program on parallel computers with any degree of parallelism in near-optimal time. We propose three Parallelism-Independent algorithms, which have the following phases: obtaining a parallel schedule by using a list scheduling heuristics, optimization of the parallel schedule by rearranging the tasks in each level, so that they can be executed efficiently with different degrees of parallelism, serialization of the parallel schedule, and insertion of markers for the parallel execution limits. The three algorithms differ in their optimization phase. To prove the efficiency of our algorithms, we have made simulations with random directed acyclic graphs with different size and degree of parallelism. We compared the results in terms of schedule length to those obtained using the Critical Path Algorithm separately for each degree of parallelism.

The propagation and the gate operation of femtosecond pulses in nonlinear optical waveguides utilizing the saturation of the intersubband absorption at 1.55 µm in nitride multiple quantum wells are simulated for the first time. The calculation was carried out by a one-dimensional finite-difference time-domain (FD-TD) method combined with three-level rate equations describing the intersubband carrier dynamics. The absorption recovers within 1 ps when the pulse width is less than 200 fs, which will allow 1-Tb/s operation. However, the pulse shape may be deformed with the propagation due to the coherent effect and the interference between the signal and the control pulses, and thus, optimization of the pulse widths and the incident timing is required. Since the transparent window (width of the control pulse) becomes shorter according to the propagation, the width of the control pulse should be set broader than that of the signal pulse. As an example, we assume the case where a 1.6-µm, 100-fs signal pulse is gated by a 300-fs control pulse at a wavelength of 1.5 µm in a 500-µm length waveguide. A 140-fs gated signal pulse with a smooth envelope is expected to appear after the band-pass filter. The extinction ratio is expected to be greater than 15 dB.

We present two estimation methods for camera rotation from two images obtained by the active camera before and after rotation. Based on the representation of the projected rotation group, quasi moment features are constructed. Camera rotation can be estimated by applying the singular value decomposition (SVD) or Newton's method to tensor quasi moment features. In both cases, we can estimate 3D rotation of the active camera from only two projected images. We also give some experiments for the estimation of the actual active camera rotation to show the effectiveness of these methods.

In this letter, a numerical design approach for FIR diamond-shaped filter banks (DFB) with perfect reconstruction (PR) and low delay for tree-structured HDTV coding is presented. The system delay of the designed DFB can be controlled below the category of the linear-phase. Moreover, the necessary conditions for the system delay of the designed DFB are derived. The considered problem is formulated as the minimization of the real and imaginary parts of weighted peak ripple errors of the designed analysis filters subject to PR constraints. Simulation example is provided to show the efficacy of this proposed design technique.

A theoretical study on high slope-efficiency phase-shifted DFB laser diodes is presented. We have proposed a new grating structure called asymmetrically-pitch-modulated (APM) grating, and calculated its slope- efficiency and single-mode-yield. In order to take into account the modulated grating period; we have developed an F-matrix which directly includes a chirped grating structure. APM phase-shifted DFB laser diodes consist of a uniform grating in one half section of the cavity and a chirped grating in the other half. This structure causes asymmetrical field distribution inside the cavity and the optical output power from one facet is larger than that from the other facet. According to the simulation results, when the normalized coupling coefficient κ L is 3.0, the front-to-rear output power ratio is 2.6, while the single-mode-yield remains at 100%, and simultaneously the slope-efficiency improvement becomes 65% better than that of ordinary quarter-wave phase-shifted DFB lasers of the same κ L value.

The multiple access causes an interference problem in the direct-sequence code-division multiple access systems. An efficient adaptive algorithm should be used to suppress this interference for the improvement of system performance. In this paper, the new blind adaptive method is suggested using the constant modulus algorithm for the purpose of interference suppression. Simulation results show that the converged value of signal to interference ratio for the proposed method is approximately 6 [dB] larger than that of a conventional Blind-MOE receiver in the additive white Gaussian noise channel and channel with inter-symbol interference while the signal to interference ratio improvement is almost 4 [dB] better in the Rayleigh fading channel. The suggested method is also robust to the new user interference resulting the nearly 3 [dB] improvement of the SIR value comparing with the conventional receiver. Based on these results, it is shown that the BER of the proposed receiver is lower than that of any other conventional receiver. Therefore, using the newly suggested method, the considerable performance improvement can be obtained for the DS-CDMA systems.

Design patterns which Erich Gamma advocates is expected as an effective approach for the reuse of designs. So, design patterns are predicted to be used frequently in object-oriented software development. In such circumstance, tools to support applying design patterns to the design diagrams of the system under development are thought to be useful. This research develops Object-Oriented Pattern Applying Support tool OOPAS. It consists of a library of Gamma design patterns with very familiar examples and adrem explanation, and of a function to generate the correctly modified design diagrams of the application system when a design pattern was applied to evolve that system. Actually, these functions are installed in the structured object modeling environment SOME, which is an object-oriented design diagram editor made previously in our laboratory. This design diagram evolving function is formalized as a Join operation of the recursive graph. As a result of the evaluation experiment, the join operation can be applied to the almost of the twenty three Gamma design patterns excluding the six patterns such as Iterator and Command, which are stated at too abstract level to be represented by the design diagrams.

A new algorithm is proposed for improving the convergence of backpropagtion networks. This algorithm is obtained by combining the conjugate gradient method and the Kalman filter algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can perform satisfactorily in all cases considered.

Software radio base and personal station prototypes are proposed and implemented. The prototypes are composed of RF/IF, A/D and D/A, pre- and post-processors, CPU, and DSP parts. System software is partitioned into CPU program and DSP program to use processor resources effectively. They support various air interfaces, some of which are equivalent to the 384 kbit/s transmission rate PHS (personal handy phone system) and a 96 kbit/s transmission rate system. The base station can also be used as a communication bridge between two systems. In order to ease IF filter requirements, the zero-stuff method is employed. Basic transmission and receiving performances are evaluated in an experiment and their results agree well with those expected.

In a multihop network, radio packets are often relayed through inter-mediate stations (repeaters) in order to transfer a radio packet from a source to its destination. We consider a scheduling problem in a multihop network using a graphtheoretical model. Let D=(V,A) be the digraph with a vertex set V and an arc set A. Let f be a labeling of positive integers on the arcs of A. The value of f(u,v) means a frequency band assigned on the link from u to v. We call f antitransitive if f(u,v)f(v,w) for any adjacent arcs (u,v) and (v,w) of D. The minimum antitransitive-labeling problem is the problem of finding a minimum antitransitive-labeling such that the number of integers assigned in an antitransitive labeling is minimum. In this paper, we prove that this problem is NP-hard, and we propose a simple distributed approximation algorithm for it.