Almost all existing password-based authenticated key exchange (PAKE) schemes achieve concurrent security in the standard model by relying on the common reference string (CRS) model. A drawback of the CRS model is to require a centralized trusted authority in the setup phase; thus, passwords of parties may be revealed if the authority ill-uses trapdoor information of the CRS. There are a few secure PAKE schemes in the plain model, but, these are not achievable in a constant round (i.e., containing a linear number of rounds). In this paper, we discuss how to relax the setup assumption for (constant round) PAKE schemes. We focus on the multi-string (MS) model that allows a number of authorities (including malicious one) to provide some reference strings independently. The MS model is a more relaxed setup assumption than the CRS model because we do not trust any single authority (i.e., just assuming that a majority of authorities honestly generate their reference strings). Though the MS model is slightly restrictive than the plain model, it is very reasonable assumption because it is very easy to implement. We construct a (concurrently secure) three-move PAKE scheme in the MS model (justly without random oracles) based on the Groce-Katz PAKE scheme. The main ingredient of our scheme is the multi-string simulation-extractable non-interactive zero-knowledge proof that provides both the simulation-extractability and the extraction zero-knowledge property even if minority authorities are malicious. This work can be seen as a milestone toward constant round PAKE schemes in the plain model.

This paper introduces the maximization version of the k-path vertex cover problem, called the MAXIMUM K-PATH VERTEX COVER problem (MaxPkVC for short): A path consisting of k vertices, i.e., a path of length k-1 is called a k-path. If a k-path Pk includes a vertex v in a vertex set S, then we say that v or S covers Pk. Given a graph G=(V, E) and an integer s, the goal of MaxPkVC is to find a vertex subset S⊆V of at most s vertices such that the number of k-paths covered by S is maximized. The problem MaxPkVC is generally NP-hard. In this paper we consider the tractability/intractability of MaxPkVC on subclasses of graphs. We prove that MaxP3VC remains NP-hard even for split graphs. Furthermore, if the input graph is restricted to graphs with constant bounded treewidth, then MaxP3VC can be solved in polynomial time.

Recently, GaN devices are often adopted in microwave power amplifiers to improve the performances. And many new design methods of microwave power amplifier were proposed. As a result, a high-efficiency and super compact microwave signal source has become easily available. It opens up the way for new microwave heating systems. In this paper, the recent progress on design methods of microwave power amplifier and the applications for microwave heating are described. In the first, a device model of GaN transistor is explained. An equivalent thermal model is introduced into the electrical non-linear equivalent device model. In the second, an active load-pull (ALP) measurement system to design a high-efficiency power amplifier is explained. The principle of the conventional closed-loop ALP system is explained. To avoid the risk of oscillation for the closed-loop ALP system, novel ALP systems are proposed. In the third, a microwave heating system is explained. The heating system monitors the reflection wave. Then, the frequency of the signal source and the phase difference between antennas are controlled to minimize the reflection wave. Absorption efficiency of more than 90% was obtained by the control of frequency and phase. In the last part, applications for a medical instrument is described.

Advances in deep reinforcement learning have demonstrated its effectiveness in a wide variety of domains. Deep neural networks are capable of approximating value functions and policies in complex environments. However, deep neural networks inherit a number of drawbacks. Lack of interpretability limits their usability in many safety-critical real-world scenarios. Moreover, they rely on huge amounts of data to learn efficiently. This may be suitable in simulated tasks, but restricts their use to many real-world applications. Finally, their generalization capability is low, the ability to determine that a situation is similar to one encountered previously. We present a method to combine external knowledge and interpretable reinforcement learning. We derive a rule-based variant version of the Sarsa(λ) algorithm, which we call Sarsa-rb(λ), that augments data with prior knowledge and exploits similarities among states. We demonstrate that our approach leverages small amounts of prior knowledge to significantly accelerate the learning in multiple domains such as trading or visual navigation. The resulting agent provides substantial gains in training speed and performance over deep q-learning (DQN), deep deterministic policy gradients (DDPG), and improves stability over proximal policy optimization (PPO).

This paper investigates the closure properties of multi-inkdot nondeterministic Turing machines with sublogarithmic space. We show that the class of sets accepted by the Turing machines is not closed under concatenation with regular set, Kleene closure, length-preserving homomorphism, and intersection.

With the rapid evolution and increase of cyberthreats in recent years, it is necessary to detect and understand it promptly and precisely to reduce the impact of cyberthreats. A darknet, which is an unused IP address space, has a high signal-to-noise ratio, so it is easier to understand the global tendency of malicious traffic in cyberspace than other observation networks. In this paper, we aim to capture global cyberthreats in real time. Since multiple hosts infected with similar malware tend to perform similar behavior, we propose a system that estimates a degree of synchronizations from the patterns of packet transmission time among the source hosts observed in unit time of the darknet and detects anomalies in real time. In our evaluation, we perform our proof-of-concept implementation of the proposed engine to demonstrate its feasibility and effectiveness, and we detect cyberthreats with an accuracy of 97.14%. This work is the first practical trial that detects cyberthreats from in-the-wild darknet traffic regardless of new types and variants in real time, and it quantitatively evaluates the result.

In this paper, we propose a new leakage-resilient identity-based encryption (IBE) scheme that is secure against chosen-ciphertext attacks (CCA) in the bounded memory leakage model. The security of our scheme is based on the external k-Linear assumption. It is the first CCA-secure leakage-resilient IBE scheme which does not depend on q-type assumptions. The leakage rate 1/10 is achieved under the XDLIN assumption (k=2).

In this paper, we propose a secure computation of sparse coding and its application to Encryption-then-Compression (EtC) systems. The proposed scheme introduces secure sparse coding that allows computation of an Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) algorithm in an encrypted domain. We prove theoretically that the proposed method estimates exactly the same sparse representations that the OMP algorithm for non-encrypted computation does. This means that there is no degradation of the sparse representation performance. Furthermore, the proposed method can control the sparsity without decoding the encrypted signals. Next, we propose an EtC system based on the secure sparse coding. The proposed secure EtC system can protect the private information of the original image contents while performing image compression. It provides the same rate-distortion performance as that of sparse coding without encryption, as demonstrated on both synthetic data and natural images.

This paper proposes a technique that increases the lifetime of large scale integration (LSI) devices. As semiconductor technology improves at miniaturizing transistors, aging effects due to bias temperature instability (BTI) seriously affects their lifetime. BTI increases the threshold voltage of transistors thereby also increasing the delay of an electronics device, resulting in failures due to timing violations. To compensate for aging-induced timing violations, we exploit configurable approximate computing. Assuming that target circuits have exact and approximate modes, they are configured for the approximate mode if an aging sensor predicts violations. Experiments using an example circuit revealed an increase in its lifetime to >10 years.

Although the classical vector median filter (VMF) has been widely used to suppress the impulse noise in the color image, many thin color curve pixels aligned in arbitrary directions are usually removed out as impulse noise. This serious problem can be solved by the proposed method that can protect the thin curves in arbitrary direction in color image and remove out the impulse noise at the same time. Firstly, samples in the 3x3 filter window are considered to preliminarily detect whether the center pixel is corrupted by impulse noise or not. Then, samples outside a 5x5 filter window are conditionally and partly considered to accurately distinguish the impulse noise and the noise-free pixel. At last, based on the previous outputs, samples on the processed positions in a 3x3 filter window are chosen as the samples of VMF operation to suppress the impulse noise. Extensive experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm can be used to remove the impulse noise of color image while protecting the thin curves in arbitrary directions.

Plane wave scattering from a circular conducting cylinder and a circular conducting strip has been formulated by equivalent surface currents which are postulated from the scattering geometrical optics (GO) field. Thus derived radiation far fields are found to be the same as those formulated by a conventional physical optics (PO) approximation for both E and H polarizations.

A polyphase sequence set with orthogonality consisting complex elements with unit magnitude, can be expressed by a unitary matrix corresponding to the complex Hadamard matrix or the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) matrix, whose rows are orthogonal to each other. Its matched filter bank (MFB), which can simultaneously output the correlation between a received symbol and any sequence in the set, is effective for constructing communication systems flexibly. This paper discusses the compact design of the MFB of a polyphase sequence set, which can be applied to any sequence set generated by the given logic function. It is primarily focused on a ZCZ code with q-phase or more elements expressed as A(N=qn+s, M=qn-1, Zcz=qs(q-1)), where q, N, M and Zcz respectively denote, a positive integer, sequence period, family size, and a zero correlation zone, since the compact design of the MFB becomes difficult when Zcz is large. It is shown that the given logic function on the ring of integers modulo q generating the ZCZ code gives the matrix representation of the MFB that M-dimensional output vector can be represented by the product of the unitary matrix of order M and an M-dimensional input vector whose elements are written as the sum of elements of an N-dimensional input vector. Since the unitary matrix (complex Hadamard matrix) can be factorized into n-1 unitary matrices of order M with qM nonzero elements corresponding to fast unitary transform, a compact MFB with a minimum number of circuit elements can be designed. Its hardware complexity is reduced from O(MN) to O(qM log q M+N).

In this paper, we propose a filter-and-forward relay scheme with energy harvesting for single-carrier transmission in frequency-selective channels. The relay node harvests energy from both the source node transmit signal and its own transmit signal by self-energy recycling. The signal received by the relay node is filtered to suppress the inter-symbol interference and then forwarded to the destination node using the harvested energy. We consider a filter design method based on the signal-to-interference-plus-noise power ratio maximization, subject to a constraint that limits the relay transmit power. In addition, we provide a golden-section search based algorithm to optimize the power splitting ratio of the power splitting protocol. The simulation results show that filtering and self-energy recycling of the proposed scheme are effective in improving performance. It is also shown that the proposed scheme is useful even when only partial channel state information is available.

This paper presents a method for many-to-one voice conversion using phonetic posteriorgrams (PPGs) based on an adversarial training of deep neural networks (DNNs). A conventional method for many-to-one VC can learn a mapping function from input acoustic features to target acoustic features through separately trained DNN-based speech recognition and synthesis models. However, 1) the differences among speakers observed in PPGs and 2) an over-smoothing effect of generated acoustic features degrade the converted speech quality. Our method performs a domain-adversarial training of the recognition model for reducing the PPG differences. In addition, it incorporates a generative adversarial network into the training of the synthesis model for alleviating the over-smoothing effect. Unlike the conventional method, ours jointly trains the recognition and synthesis models so that they are optimized for many-to-one VC. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed method significantly improves the converted speech quality compared with conventional VC methods.

Fresh Tea Shoot Maturity Estimation (FTSME) is the basement of automatic tea picking technique, determines whether the shoot can be picked. Unfortunately, the ambiguous information among single labels and uncontrollable imaging condition lead to a low FTSME accuracy. A novel Fresh Tea Shoot Maturity Estimating method via multispectral imaging and Deep Label Distribution Learning (FTSME-DLDL) is proposed to overcome these issues. The input is 25-band images, and the output is the corresponding tea shoot maturity label distribution. We utilize the multiple VGG-16 and auto-encoding network to obtain the multispectral features, and learn the label distribution by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence using deep convolutional neural networks. The experimental results show that the proposed method has a better performance on FTSME than the state-of-the-art methods.

In this letter, a piecewise linear (PWL) sigmoid function approximation based on the statistical distribution probability of the neurons' values in each layer is proposed to improve the network recognition accuracy with only addition circuit. The sigmoid function is first divided into three fixed regions, and then according to the neurons' values distribution probability, the curve in each region is segmented into sub-regions to reduce the approximation error and improve the recognition accuracy. Experiments performed on Xilinx's FPGA-XC7A200T for MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets show that the proposed method achieves 97.45% recognition accuracy in DNN, 98.42% in CNN on MNIST and 72.22% on CIFAR-10, up to 0.84%, 0.57% and 2.01% higher than other approximation methods with only addition circuit.

This paper describes designing a new pedestrian navigation system using a comprehensive framework called the pedestrian navigation concept reference model (PNCRM). We implement this system as a publicly-available smartphone application and evaluate its positioning performance near Omiya station's western entrance. We also evaluate users' subjective impressions of the system using a questionnaire. In both cases, promising results are obtained, showing that the PNCRM can be used as a tool for designing pedestrian navigation systems, allowing such systems to be created systematically.

Broadband amplifiers have been used in modern wireless communication systems. However, the accompanying disadvantage is that there is more nonlinear interference in the available operating frequency band. In addition to the in-band intermodulation distortion which affecting adjacent frequency bands the most important is harmonic distortion. In this letter we present a robust and low complex digital harmonic canceling model called cross-disturbing harmonic (CDH) model for broadband power amplifiers (PAs). The approach introducing cross terms is used to enhance the robustness of the model, thereby significantly increase the stability of the system. The CDH model still has excellent performance when actively reducing the number of coefficients. Comparisons are conducted between the CDH model and the other state-of-the-art model called memory polynomial harmonic (MPM) model. Experimental results show that the CDH model can achieve comparable performance as the MPM model but with much fewer (43%) coefficients.

Simultaneous multithreading technology (SMT) can effectively improve the overall throughput and fairness through improving the resources usage efficiency of processors. Traditional works have proposed some metrics for evaluation in real systems, each of which strikes a trade-off between fairness and throughput. How to choose an appropriate metric to meet the demand is still controversial. Therefore, we put forward suggestions on how to select the appropriate metrics through analyzing and comparing the characteristics of each metric. In addition, for the new application scenario of cloud computing, the data centers have high demand for the quality of service for killer applications, which bring new challenges to SMT in terms of performance guarantees. Therefore, we propose a new metric P-slowdown to evaluate the quality of performance guarantees. Based on experimental data, we show the feasibility of P-slowdown on performance evaluation. We also demonstrate the benefit of P-slowdown through two use cases, in which we not only improve the performance guarantee level of SMT processors through the cooperation of P-slowdown and resources allocation strategy, but also use P-slowdown to predict the occurrence of abnormal behavior against security attacks.

In the age of big data, recommendation systems provide users with fast access to interesting information, resulting to a significant commercial value. However, the extreme sparseness of user assessment data is one of the key factors that lead to the poor performance of recommendation algorithms. To address this problem, we propose a spectral clustering recommendation scheme with low-rank matrix completion and spectral clustering. Our scheme exploits spectral clustering to achieve the division of a similar user group. Meanwhile, the low-rank matrix completion is used to effectively predict un-rated items in the sub-matrix of the spectral clustering. With the real dataset experiment, the results show that our proposed scheme can effectively improve the prediction accuracy of un-rated items.