Quantum key distribution or secret key distribution (SKD) has been studied to deliver a secrete key for secure communications, whose security is physically guaranteed. For practical deployment, such systems are desired to be overlaid onto existing wavelength-multiplexing transmission systems, without using a dedicated transmission line. This study analytically investigates the feasibility of the intensity-modulation/direction-detection (IM/DD) SKD scheme being wavelength-multiplexed with conventional wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) signals, concerning spontaneous Raman scattering light from conventional optical signals. Simulation results indicate that IM/DD SKD systems are not degraded when they are overlaid onto practically deployed dense WDM transmission systems in the C-band, owing to the feature of the IM/DD SKD scheme, which uses a signal light with an intensity level comparable to conventional optical signals unlike conventional quantum key distribution schemes.

This paper introduces heuristic approaches and a deep reinforcement learning approach to solve a joint virtual network function deployment and scheduling problem in a dynamic scenario. We formulate the problem as an optimization problem. Based on the mathematical description of the optimization problem, we introduce three heuristic approaches and a deep reinforcement learning approach to solve the problem. We define an objective to maximize the ratio of delay-satisfied requests while minimizing the average resource cost for a dynamic scenario. Our introduced two greedy approaches are named finish time greedy and computational resource greedy, respectively. In the finish time greedy approach, we make each request be finished as soon as possible despite its resource cost; in the computational resource greedy approach, we make each request occupy as few resources as possible despite its finish time. Our introduced simulated annealing approach generates feasible solutions randomly and converges to an approximate solution. In our learning-based approach, neural networks are trained to make decisions. We use a simulated environment to evaluate the performances of our introduced approaches. Numerical results show that the introduced deep reinforcement learning approach has the best performance in terms of benefit in our examined cases.

In this paper, we investigate a wireless-powered relays assisted batteryless IoT network based on the non-linear energy harvesting model, where there exists an energy service provider constituted by the hybrid access point (HAP) and an IoT service provider constituted by multiple clusters. The HAP provides energy signals to the batteryless devices for information backscattering and the wireless-powered relays for energy harvesting. The relays are deployed to assist the batteryless devices with the information transmission to the HAP by using the harvested energy. To model the energy interactions between the energy service provider and IoT service provider, we propose a Stackelberg game based framework. We aim to maximize the respective utility values of the two providers. Since the utility maximization problem of the IoT service provider is non-convex, we employ the fractional programming theory and propose a block coordinate descent (BCD) based algorithm with successive convex approximation (SCA) and semi-definite relaxation (SDR) techniques to solve it. Numerical simulation results confirm that compared to the benchmark schemes, our proposed scheme can achieve larger utility values for both the energy service provider and IoT service provider.

This paper proposes an adaptive mixing probability scheme for mixed Gibbs sampling (MGS) or MGS with maximum ratio combining (MRC) in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) demodulation. In the conventional MGS algorithm, the mixing probability is fixed. Thus, if a search point is captured by a local minimum, it takes a larger number of samples to escape. In the proposed scheme, the mixing probability is increased when a candidate transmit symbol vector is captured by a local minimum. Using the adaptive mixing probability, the numbers of candidate transmit symbol vectors searched by demodulation algorithms increase. The proposed scheme in MGS as well as MGS with MRC reduces an error floor level as compared with the conventional scheme. Numerical results obtained through computer simulation show that the bit error rates of the MGS as well as the MGS with MRC reduces by about 1/100 when the number of iterations is 100 in a 64×64 MIMO system.

This paper proposes a multibeam digital predistorter (DPD) that suppresses intercarrier interference caused by nonlinear distortions of power amplifiers (PAs) while reducing the power consumption of a multibeam array antenna transmitter. The proposed DPD reduces power consumption by allowing the final PAs of the array antenna transmitter to operate in a highly efficient nonlinear mode and compensating for the nonlinear distortions of the PAs with a unified dedicated DPD per subarray. Additionally, it provides the required high-quality signal transmission for high throughputs, such as realizing a 256-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) transmission instead of a 64-QAM transmission. Specifically, it adds an inverse-component signal to cancel the interference from an adjacent carrier of another beam. Consequently, it can suppress the intercarrier interference in the beam direction and improve the error vector magnitude (EVM) during the multibeam transmission, in which the frequency bands of the beams are adjacent. The experimental results obtained for two beams at 28.0 and 28.4GHz demonstrate that, compared with the previous single-beam DPD, the proposed multibeam DPD can improve the EVM. Also, they demonstrate that the proposed DPD can achieve an EVM value of <3%, which completely satisfies the 3GPP requirements for a 256-QAM transmission.

Frame synchronization detection before data transmission is an important module which directly affects the lifetime and coexistence of underwater acoustic communication (UAC) networks, where linear frequency modulation (LFM) is a frame preamble signal commonly used for synchronization. Unlike terrestrial wireless communications, strong bursty noise frequently appears in UAC. Due to the long transmission distance and the low signal-to-noise ratio, strong short-distance bursty noise will greatly reduce the accuracy of conventional fractional fourier transform (FrFT) detection. We propose a multi-segment verification fractional fourier transform (MFrFT) preamble detection algorithm to address this challenge. In the proposed algorithm, 4 times of adjacent FrFT operations are carried out. And the LFM signal identifies by observing the linear correlation between two lines connected in pair among three adjacent peak points, called ‘dual-line-correlation mechanism’. The accurate starting time of the LFM signal can be found according to the peak frequency of the adjacent FrFT. More importantly, MFrFT do not result in an increase in computational complexity. Compared with the conventional FrFT detection method, experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively distinguish between signal starting points and bursty noise with much lower error detection rate, which in turn minimizes the cost of retransmission.

Physical contact (PC) optical connectors realize long-term stability by maintaining contact with the optical fiber even during temperature fluctuations caused by the microscopic displacement of the ferrule endface. With multicore fiber (MCF) connectors, stable PC connection conditions need to be newly investigated because MCFs have cores other than at the center. In this work, we investigated the microscopic displacement of connected ferrule endfaces using the finite element method (FEM). As a result, by using MCF connectors with an apex offset, we found that the allowable fiber undercut where all the cores make contact is slightly smaller than that of single-mode fiber (SMF) connectors. Therefore, we propose a new equation for determining the allowable fiber undercut of MCF connectors. We also fabricated MCF connectors with an allowable fiber undercut and confirmed their reliability using the composite temperature/humidity cyclic test.

In the Robot Operating System (ROS), a major middleware for robots, the Transform Library (TF) is a mandatory package that manages transformation information between coordinate systems by using a directed forest data structure and providing methods for registering and computing the information. However, the structure has two fundamental problems. The first is its poor scalability: since it accepts only a single thread at a time due to using a single giant lock for mutual exclusion, the access to the tree is sequential. Second, there is a lack of data freshness: it retrieves non-latest synthetic data when computing coordinate transformations because it prioritizes temporal consistency over data freshness. In this paper, we propose methods based on transactional techniques. This will allow us to avoid anomalies, achieve high performance, and obtain fresh data. These transactional methods show a throughput of up to 429 times higher than the conventional method on a read-only workload and a freshness of up to 1276 times higher than the conventional one on a read-write combined workload.

The Order/Radix Problem (ORP) is an optimization problem that can be solved to find an optimal network topology in distributed memory systems. It is important to find the optimum number of switches in the ORP. In the case of a regular graph, a good estimation of the preferred number of switches has been proposed, and it has been shown that simulated annealing (SA) finds a good solution given a fixed number of switches. However, generally the optimal graph does not necessarily satisfy the regular condition, which greatly increases the computational costs required to find a good solution with a suitable number of switches for each case. This study improved the new method based on SA to find a suitable number of switches. By introducing neighborhood searches in which the number of switches is increased or decreased, our method can optimize a graph by changing the number of switches adaptively during the search. In numerical experiments, we verified that our method shows a good approximation for the best setting for the number of switches, and can simultaneously generate a graph with a small host-to-host average shortest path length, using instances presented by Graph Golf, an international ORP competition.

FPGA cluster is a promising platform for future computing not only in the cloud but in the 5G wireless base stations with limited power supply by taking significant advantage of power efficiency. However, almost no power analyses with real systems have been reported. This work reports the detailed power consumption analyses of two FPGA clusters, namely FiC and M-KUBOS clusters with introducing power measurement tools and running the real applications. From the detailed analyses, we find that the number of activated links mainly determines the total power consumption of the systems regardless they are used or not. To improve the performance of applications while reducing power consumption, we should increase the clock frequency of the applications, use the minimum number of links and apply link aggregation. We also propose the power model for both clusters from the results of the analyses and this model can estimate the total power consumption of both FPGA clusters at the design step with 15% errors at maximum.

Binary Neural Networks (BNN) have binarized neuron and connection values so that their accelerators can be realized by extremely efficient hardware. However, there is a significant accuracy gap between BNNs and networks with wider bit-width. Conventional BNNs binarize feature maps by static globally-unified thresholds, which makes the produced bipolar image lose local details. This paper proposes a multi-input activation function to enable adaptive thresholding for binarizing feature maps: (a) At the algorithm level, instead of operating each input pixel independently, adaptive thresholding dynamically changes the threshold according to surrounding pixels of the target pixel. When optimizing weights, adaptive thresholding is equivalent to an accompanied depth-wise convolution between normal convolution and binarization. Accompanied weights in the depth-wise filters are ternarized and optimized end-to-end. (b) At the hardware level, adaptive thresholding is realized through a multi-input activation function, which is compatible with common accelerator architectures. Compact activation hardware with only one extra accumulator is devised. By equipping the proposed method on FPGA, 4.1% accuracy improvement is achieved on the original BNN with only 1.1% extra LUT resource. Compared with State-of-the-art methods, the proposed idea further increases network accuracy by 0.8% on the Cifar-10 dataset and 0.4% on the ImageNet dataset.

Widely adopted by machine learning and graph processing applications nowadays, sparse matrix-Vector multiplication (SpMV) is a very popular algorithm in linear algebra. This is especially the case for fully-connected MLP layers, which dominate many SpMV computations and play a substantial role in diverse services. As a consequence, a large fraction of data center cycles is spent on SpMV kernels. Meanwhile, despite having efficient storage options against sparsity (such as CSR or CSC), SpMV kernels still suffer from the problem of limited memory bandwidth during data transferring because of the memory hierarchy of modern computing systems. In more detail, we find that both integer and floating-point data used in SpMV kernels are handled plainly without any necessary pre-processing. Therefore, we believe bandwidth conservation techniques, such as data compression, may dramatically help SpMV kernels when data is transferred between the main memory and the Last Level Cache (LLC). Furthermore, we also observe that convergence conditions in some typical scientific computation benchmarks (based on SpMV kernels) will not be degraded when adopting lower precision floating-point data. Based on these findings, in this work, we propose a simple yet effective data compression scheme that can be extended to general purpose computing architectures or HPC systems preferably. When it is adopted, a best-case speedup of 1.92x is made. Besides, evaluations with both the CG kernel and the PageRank algorithm indicate that our proposal introduces negligible overhead on both the convergence speed and the accuracy of final results.

Universities collect and process a massive amount of Personal Identifiable Information (PII) at registration and throughout interactions with individuals. However, student PII can be exposed to the public by uploading documents along with university notice without consent and awareness, which could put individuals at risk of a variety of different scams, such as identity theft, fraud, or phishing. In this paper, we perform an in-depth analysis of student PII leakage at Vietnamese universities. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to conduct a comprehensive study on student PII leakage in higher educational institutions. We find that 52.8% of Vietnamese universities leak student PII, including one or more types of personal data, in documents on their websites. It is important to note that the compromised PII includes sensitive types of data, student medical record and religion. Also, student PII leakage is not a new phenomenon and it has happened year after year since 2005. Finally, we present a study with 23 Vietnamese university employees who have worked on student PII to get a deeper understanding of this situation and envisage concrete solutions. The results are entirely surprising: the employees are highly aware of the concept of student PII. However, student PII leakage still happens due to their working habits or the lack of a management system and regulation. Therefore, the Vietnamese university should take a more active stand to protect student data in this situation.

The aim of a computer-aided drawing therapy system in this work is to associate drawings which a client makes with the client's mental state in quantitative terms. A case study is conducted on experimental data which contain both pastel drawings and mental state scores obtained from the same client in a psychotherapy program. To perform such association through colors, we translate a drawing to a color feature by measuring its representative colors as primary color rates. A primary color rate of a color is defined from a psychological primary color in a way such that it shows a rate of emotional properties of the psychological primary color which is supposed to affect the color. To obtain several informative colors as representative ones of a drawing, we define two kinds of color: approximate colors extracted by color reduction, and area-averaged colors calculated from the approximate colors. A color analysis method for extracting representative colors from each drawing in a drawing sequence under the same conditions is presented. To estimate how closely a color feature is associated with a concurrent mental state, we propose a method of utilizing machine-learning classification. A practical way of building a classification model through training and validation on a very small dataset is presented. The classification accuracy reached by the model is considered as the degree of association of the color feature with the mental state scores given in the dataset. Experiments were carried out on given clinical data. Several kinds of color feature were compared in terms of the association with the same mental state. As a result, we found out a good color feature with the highest degree of association. Also, primary color rates proved more effective in representing colors in psychological terms than RGB components. The experimentals provide evidence that colors can be associated quantitatively with states of human mind.

In this paper, we apply two methods in machine learning, dropout and semi-supervised learning, to a recently proposed method called CSQ-SDL which uses deep neural networks for evaluating shift quality from time-series measurement data. When developing a new Automatic Transmission (AT), calibration takes place where many parameters of the AT are adjusted to realize pleasant driving experience in all situations that occur on all roads around the world. Calibration requires an expert to visually assess the shift quality from the time-series measurement data of the experiments each time the parameters are changed, which is iterative and time-consuming. The CSQ-SDL was developed to shorten time consumed by the visual assessment, and its effectiveness depends on acquiring a sufficient number of data points. In practice, however, data amounts are often insufficient. The methods proposed here can handle such cases. For the cases wherein only a small number of labeled data points is available, we propose a method that uses dropout. For those cases wherein the number of labeled data points is small but the number of unlabeled data is sufficient, we propose a method that uses semi-supervised learning. Experiments show that while the former gives moderate improvement, the latter offers a significant performance improvement.

The image-to-image translation aims to learn a mapping between the source and target domains. For improving visual quality, the majority of previous works adopt multi-stage techniques to refine coarse results in a progressive manner. In this work, we present a novel approach for generating plausible details by only introducing a group of intermediate supervisions without cascading multiple stages. Specifically, we propose a Laplacian Pyramid Transformation Generative Adversarial Network (LapTransGAN) to simultaneously transform components in different frequencies from the source domain to the target domain within only one stage. Hierarchical perceptual and gradient penalization are utilized for learning consistent semantic structures and details at each pyramid level. The proposed model is evaluated based on various metrics, including the similarity in feature maps, reconstruction quality, segmentation accuracy, similarity in details, and qualitative appearances. Our experiments show that LapTransGAN can achieve a much better quantitative performance than both the supervised pix2pix model and the unsupervised CycleGAN model. Comprehensive ablation experiments are conducted to study the contribution of each component.

Recent studies have shown that concurrent transmission with precise time synchronization enables reliable and efficient flooding for wireless networks. However, most of them require all nodes in the network to forward packets a fixed number of times to reach the destination, which leads to unnecessary energy consumption in both one-to-one and many-to-one communication scenarios. In this letter, we propose G1M address this issue by reducing redundant packet forwarding in concurrent transmissions. The evaluation of G1M shows that compared with LWB, the average energy consumption of one-to-one and many-to-one transmission is reduced by 37.89% and 25%, respectively.

Advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) generally play an important role to support safe drive by detecting potential risk factors beforehand and informing the driver of them. However, if too many services in ADAS rely on visual-based technologies, the driver becomes increasingly burdened and exhausted especially on their eyes. The drivers should be back out of monitoring tasks other than significantly important ones in order to alleviate the burden of the driver as long as possible. In-vehicle auditory signals to assist the safe drive have been appealing as another approach to altering visual suggestions in recent years. In this paper, we developed an in-vehicle auditory signals evaluation platform in an existing driving simulator. In addition, using in-vehicle auditory signals, we have demonstrated that our developed platform has highlighted the possibility to partially switch from only visual-based tasks to mixing with auditory-based ones for alleviating the burden on drivers.

This paper presents a deep network based on unrolling the diffusion process with the morphological Laplacian. The diffusion process is an iterative algorithm that can solve the diffusion equation and represents time evolution with Laplacian. The diffusion process is applied to smoothing of images and has been extended with non-linear operators for various image processing tasks. In this study, we introduce the morphological Laplacian to the basic diffusion process and unwrap to deep networks. The morphological filters are non-linear operators with parameters that are referred to as structuring elements. The discrete Laplacian can be approximated with the morphological filters without multiplications. Owing to the non-linearity of the morphological filter with trainable structuring elements, the training uses error back propagation and the network of the morphology can be adapted to specific image processing applications. We introduce two extensions of the morphological Laplacian for deep networks. Since the morphological filters are realized with addition, max, and min, the error caused by the limited bit-length is not amplified. Consequently, the morphological parts of the network are implemented in unsigned 8-bit integer with single instruction multiple data set (SIMD) to achieve fast computation on small devices. We applied the proposed network to image completion and Gaussian denoising. The results and computational time are compared with other denoising algorithm and deep networks.

Recent character detectors have been modeled using deep neural networks and have achieved high performance in various tasks, such as text detection in natural scenes and character detection in historical documents. However, existing methods cannot achieve high detection accuracy for wooden slips because of their multi-scale character sizes and aspect ratios, high character density, and close character-to-character distance. In this study, we propose a new U-Net-based character detection and localization framework that learns character regions and boundaries between characters. The proposed method enhances the learning performance of character regions by simultaneously learning the vertical and horizontal boundaries between characters. Furthermore, by adding simple and low-cost post-processing using the learned regions of character boundaries, it is possible to more accurately detect the location of a group of characters in a close neighborhood. In this study, we construct a wooden slip dataset. Experiments demonstrated that the proposed method outperformed existing character detection methods, including state-of-the-art character detection methods for historical documents.