This paper discusses some problems in Molecular Biology for which learning paradigms are strongly desired. We also present a framework of knowledge discovery by PAC-learning paradigm together with its theory and practice developed in our work for discovery from amino acid sequences.

The intermodulation distortion (IMD) due to laser diode (LD) nonlinearity of an asynchronous direct-sequence code division multiple access (DS/CDMA) system in optical transmission is analyzed. A third-order polynomial without memory is used to present LD nonlinearity. In DS/CDMA systems, only one harmonic of the third-order inter-modulation term falls on the signal frequency band and influences the system performance. The average distortion is derived with only the information of autocorrelation functions. The results are useful for CDMA system design and performance analysis. With LD nonlinearity it is necessary to select an optimal modulation index that provides a maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The analytical method is applicable to other general nonlinearities in CDMA systems.

This letter presents a new method to efficiently extract closed loops as primitive symbols in line drawings. Our method uses a graph search technique for efficiency and exhaustibility, and also incorporates feasibility criteria of symbols. Experiments clearly demonstrated the method's effectiveness.

In coherent optical space communication systems, the phase noise generated from high power laser diodes and the polarization axis mismatch between transmitter and receiver are the serious problem. In this paper, a novel coherent optical space communication system, called optical polarization azimuth modulation (POLAM)/heterodyne detection system is newly proposed, and its system performance is theoretically investigated. It is clarified that the POLAM system can perfectly remove the laser phase noise, is actually insensitive to the polarization axis mismatch, and can provide the remarkable performance improvement compared to a conventional optical frequency modulation system.

A Superconductor-Insulator-Superconductor (SIS) mixer using two junctions connected in parallel through a stripline inductance has been studied. The essential point of the two-junctions device is that the capacitance of the junctions was tuned out by the inductance to obtain a broadband operation without mechanical tuning elements. It has been shown by theoretical analysis that the performance of this type of device is excellent and nearly quantum-limited performance of the mixer can be obtained. It has been demonstrated that the double sideband (DSB) noise temperature of a receiver employing this type of device was less than 40 K over the bandwidth of 90-120 GHz and that the lowest receiver noise temperature of 18 K, which is only 3.2 times as large as the quantum limited photon noise was obtained around 118 GHz. Junctions used in the two-junctions device have significantly larger area, i.e. larger capacitance, and smaller normal resistance than conventional ones. In order to obtain a good impedance match between the source and the junctions, an impedance transformer made of a superconductiong stripline was integrated with the junctions. This type of two-junctions device can easily be scaled to submillimeter frequency without using submicron-sized SIS junctions.

MRI is a widely used diagnostic imaging modality because it has excellent diagnostic capabilities, is safe to use and generates images not affected by bone artifacts. Images are obtained by utilizing the phenomenon of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) by which protons located in a static magnetic field absorb radiofrequency (RF) pulses with a specific frequency and release a part of the energy as a NMR signal. Potentially MRI has the ability to provide functional and metabolic information (such as flow, temperature, diffusion, neuron activity) in addition to morphological information. This paper describes the imaging principles and provides a general outline of some applications: flow imaging, metabolite imaging and temperature imaging.

This paper describes a fully digitized modem designed for variable baud rate transmission systems with the aim of efficiently providing multimedia services over a wireless communication network. The concept of a variable baud rate wireless communication system is discussed focusing on the access scheme and channel allocation from the viewpoint of frequency utilization efficiency. For easy system construction, we propose a fully digitized variable baud rate modem based on multirate digital signal processing, taking into account the need for even performance and easy clock control for all transmission rates. We also discuss the operational principle of modulation, the degradation factor in the A/D converter, and the configuration of the clock recovery circuit. Steady modulation performance can be kept by generating the same frequency system clock for all transmission rates and using the sampling rate conversion technique without selecting the channel filter for each transmission rate. It is proved by the analysis of the degradation factor in the A/D converter that only the bandwidth of the channel filter in demodulator should be changed for the transmission rate. A double loop clock recovery configuration capable of both tank-limit type and baseband estimation type clock recovery is shown to be suitable for this system. The tank-limit clock recovery circuits can be constructed easily by employing a tank circuit array. Finally, we present experimental results for a modem having transmission rates of 1.544Mbps and 6.312Mbps for the digital hierarchy and information speed of video signals such as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. The measured basic performance of the proposed modem shows it delivers superior performance without the need for precise adjustment when a QPSK modulation scheme is employed.

The performance of trellis coded hybrid frequency and phase shift modulation (TC HFPSK) with the expurgated phase code and the asymmetric signal constellation is investigated by using the minimum squared free Euclidean distance d 2free and the bit error rate (BER). It is found that TC hybrid 2FSK/4PSK with the expurgated phase code shows larger d 2free than the corresponding TC hybrid 2FSK/4PSK with the complete phase code for varying the angle φ that determines the asymmetric signal constellation. The maximum value of d 2free of TC hybrid 2FSK/4PSK with the expurgated phase code can be obtained when the signal constellation is symmetric. The performance of BER is analyzed in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and fading channels by using uniform error property and error bound based on transfer function. It is found that the coding gain of TC hybrid 2FSK/4PSK with the expurgated phase code over uncoded hybrid 2FSK/2PSK at BER=10-4 are 2.71dB and 4.74dB in AWGN and fading channels, respectively. The performance improvements of TC hybrid 2FSK/4PSK with the expurgated phase code over TC 8PSK at BER=10-4 are 0.68dB and 4.07dB in AWGN and fading channels, respectively.

This study shows that using the direct offset integration technique (DOIT) and additional positive feedback (APF) in a high-Tc dc superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) improves the effective flux-to-voltage transfer function and reduces the flux noise of a magnetometer, thus improving the magnetic field noise. The effective flux-to-voltage transfer function and the flux noise with APF were measured at different values of the positive feedback parameter βa, which depends on the resistance of the APF circuit. These quantities were also compared between conditions with and without APF. This investigation showed that a βa condition the most suitable for minimizing the flux noise of a magnetometer with APF exists and that it is βa=0.77. The effective flux-to-voltage transfer function with APF is about three times what it is without APF (93 µV/Φ0 vs. 32 µV/Φ0). The magnetic field noise of a magnetometer with APF is improved by a factor of about 3 (242 fT/Hz vs. 738 fT/Hz).

This paper considers properties of language classes with finite elasticity in the viewpoint of set theoretic operations. Finite elasticity was introduced by Wright as a sufficient condition for language classes to be inferable from positive data, and as a property preserved by (not usual) union operation to generate a class of unions of languages. We show that the family of language classes with finite elasticity is closed under not only union but also various operations for language classes such as intersection, concatenation and so on, except complement operation. As a framework defining languages, we introduce restricted elementary formal systems (EFS's for short), called max length-bounded by which any context-sensitive language is definable. We define various operations for EFS's corresponding to usual language operations and also for EFS classes, and investigate closure properties of the family Ge of max length-bounded EFS classes that define classes of languages with finite elasticity. Furthermore, we present theorems characterizing a max length-bounded EFS class in the family Ge, and that for the language class to be inferable from positive data, provided the class is closed under subset operation. From the former, it follows that for any n, a language class definable by max length-bounded EFS's with at most n axioms has finite elasticity. This means that Ge is sufficiently large.

Computational approaches to concept formation often share a top-down, incremental, hill-climbing classification, and differ from each other in the concept representation and quality criteria. Each of them captures part of the rich variety of conceptual knowledge and many are well suited only when the object-attribute distribution is not sparse. Formal concept analysis is a set-theoretic model that mathematically formulates the human understanding of concepts, and investigates the algebraic structure, Galois lattice, of possible concepts in a given domain. Adopting the idea of representing concepts by mutual closed sets of objects and attributes as well as the Galois lattice structure for concepts from formal concept analysis, we propose an approach to concept formation and develop OSHAM, a method that forms concept hierarchies with high utility score, clear semantics and effective even with sparse object-attribute distributions. In this paper we describe OSHAM, and in an attempt to show its performance we present experimental studies on a number of data sets from the machine learning literature.

A Monte Carlo method for the passage of electrons based on a single scattering model is developed. A code based on this method is operable on personal computers, and has been applied to analyze electron behavior in a layered system consisting of Ti (an accelerator window), air, cellulose triacetate (CTA) and backing material irradiated by 300 keV electrons. The energy spectra and the angular distributions of electrons on the CTA surface as well as depth distributions of energy deposition in the CTA for various backing materials have been obtained. Some of these results are compared with experiments, and show fairly good agreement.

Recenty, the Josephson effect-based voltage standard has been realized by using the Josephson junction array which is constructed by integrating many Josephson junctions. In this article, the 1-V Josephson-junction-array voltage standard used in routine calibration work and further development of the 10-V Josephson junction array at the Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL) are introduced.

A bipolar low-voltage multiplier core is presented. The proposed low-voltage multiplier core is built from a bipolar quadritail cell. Voltages applied to the individual bases of the transistors in the bipolar quadritail cell are aVxbVy, (a1)Vx(b1)Vy ,aVx(b1)Vy, and (a1)VxbVy, where Vx and Vy are the input signals, and a and b are constants, for example, VxVy, O, Vx, and Vy. Simple input systems using resistive dividers are also described. The dc transfer characteristics were verified on a breadboard using transistor-arrays and discrete components. The dc transfer characteristic of the proposed multiplier core is very close to that of the Gilbert multiplier cell, but the proposed multiplier core is operable on low supply voltage. Therefore, a bipolar multiplier core using a quadritail cell is a low-voltage version of the Gilbert multiplier cell. The proposed bipolar multiplier is practically useful because it can be easily implemented in integrated circuits by utilizing a multiplier core and a resistor-only input system, and it also operates at very lowvoltage. Therefore, the proposed bipolar multipliers are very suitable for low-power operation.

This paper describes a parameter extraction system that can easily accommodate many MOSFET models. The model-adaptability is contributed by tow factors; a model-adaptable initial value estimation technique and an environment which stores and reuses extraction procedures. A designer can easily develop an extraction procedure for a new MOSFET model by modifying a procedure for another MOSFET model developed previously. We have verified that the system is suitable for major SPICE models.

This paper describes a SQUID magnetometer and the measurement of small signals. It also describes the current state of SQUID technology developed in the SSL project.

Various approaches on optical network systems using wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technique have been proposed. It is difficult to make a scale of WDM network larger since a number of the optical wavelength which can be used is limited. In order to make easily larger scale of network, multi-hop WDM network have been proposed. We have studied 2-hop network: RookNet which has simple routing algorithm and high network throughput. Nodes in RookNet are divided into row groups and column groups and are placed in a mesh form. Packets are transferred between nodes over 1-hop or 2-hops. The 2-hop transfer means that a source node sends packets to a destination node via a relay node. When 2-hop traffic increases, relay processing time in a relay node is increasing. This is the reason that network throughput becomes low. To solve this problem is very important. In this paper, we show RookNet rearrangement algorithm which replaces location of node within group so as to decrease the 2-hop traffic and to maintain high network throughput. Proposed rearrangement algorithm can achieve improvement of 10 percent in terms of throughput. We also propose RookNet configuration which discriminates optical wavelength and subcarrier effectively in order to decrease the relay processing time.

In this paper we investigate the learnability of relations in Inductive Logic Programming, by using equality theories as background knowledge. We assume that a hypothesis and an observation are respectively a definite program and a set of ground literals. The targets of our learning algorithm are relations. By using equality theories as background knowledge we introduce tree structure into definite programs. The structure enable us to narrow the search space of hypothesis. We give pairs of a hypothesis language and a knowledge language in order to discuss the learnability of relations from the view point of inductive inference and PAC learning.

Although consistent learning is sufficient for PAC-learning, it has not been found what strategy makes learning more efficient, especially on the sample complexity, i.e., the number of examples required. For the first step towards this problem, classes that have consistent learning algorithms with one-sided error are considered. A combinatorial quantity called maximal particle sets is introduced, and an upper bound of the sample complexity of consistent learning with one-sided error is obtained in terms of maximal particle sets. For the class of n-dimensional axis-parallel rectangles, one of those classes that are consistently learnable with one-sided error, the cardinality of the maximal particle set is estimated and O(d/ε1/ε log 1/δ) upper bound of the learning algorithm for the class is obtained. This bound improves the bounds due to Blumer et al. and meets the lower bound within a constant factor.

Motion estimation is a major part of the video coding, which traces the motion of moving objects in video sequences. Among various motion estimation algorithms, the Hierarchical Block-Matching Algorithm (HBMA) that is a multilayered motion estimation algorithm is attractive in motion-compensated interpolation when accurate motion estimation is required. However, parallel processing of HBMA is necessary since the high computational complexity of HBMA prevents it from operating in real-time. Further, the repeated updates of vectors naturally lead to pipelined processing. In this paper, we present a pipelined architecture for HBMA. We investigate the data dependency of HBMA and the requirements of the pipeline to operate synchronously. Each pipeline stage of the proposed architecture consists of a systolic array for the block-matching algorithm, a bilinear interpolator, and a latch mechanism. The latch mechanism mainly resolves the data dependency and arranges the data flow in a synchronous way. The proposed architecture achieves nearly linear speedup without additional hardware cost over a non-pipelined one. It requires the clock of 2.70 ns to process a large size of frame (e.q. HDTV) in real-time, which is about to be available under the current VLSI technology.