Eye tracking is a useful tool for accurately mapping where and for how long an individual learner looks at a video/image, in order to obtain immediate information regarding the distribution of a learner's attention among the elements of a video/image. This paper describes a quantitative investigation into the effect of voice navigation in web-based learning materials.

A new BIST (Built-in Self-test) method for static ADC testing is proposed. The proposed method detects offset, gain, INL (Integral Non-linearity) and DNL (Differential Non-linearity) errors with a low hardware overhead. Moreover, it can solve a transient zone problem which is derived from the ADC noise in real test environments.

In order to obtain better generalization performance in supervised learning, model parameters should be determined appropriately, i.e., they should be determined so that the generalization error is minimized. However, since the generalization error is inaccessible in practice, the model parameters are usually determined so that an estimator of the generalization error is minimized. The regularized subspace information criterion (RSIC) is such a generalization error estimator for model selection. RSIC includes an additional regularization parameter and it should be determined appropriately for better model selection. A meta-criterion for determining the regularization parameter has also been proposed and shown to be useful in practice. In this paper, we show that there are several drawbacks in the existing meta-criterion and give an alternative meta-criterion that can solve the problems. Through simulations, we show that the use of the new meta-criterion further improves the model selection performance.

We demonstrate a novel display structure for color electronic paper for the first time. Fully transparent amorphous oxide TFT array is directly deposited onto color filter array and combined with E Ink Imaging Film. Taking advantage of the transparent property of the oxide TFT, the color filter and TFT array are positioned at the viewing side of the display. This novel "Front Drive" display structure facilitates the alignment of the color filter and TFT dramatically.

We analyzed the correlation between three kinds of visualization of the motion blurs (colour of blurs, luminance of the blur and sharpness of object images) and physical properties in regard to image properties and panel characteristics. We also performed subjective evaluations to specify optimal or allowable level of motion blurring with various images on one CRT display and four types of LCDs with various characteristics.

The recent progress in sensor and wireless communication technologies has enabled the design and implementation of new applications such as sensor telemetry which is the use of wireless sensors to gather fine-grained information from products, people and places. In this work, we consider a realistic telemetry application in which an area is periodically monitored by a sensor network which gathers data from equally spaced sample points. The objective is to maximize the lifetime of the network by jointly selecting the sensing nodes, the node transmission powers and the route to the base station from each sensing node. We develop an optimization-based algorithm OPT-RE and a low complexity algorithm SP-RE for this purpose and analyze their dynamics through extensive numerical studies. Our results indicate that SP-RE is a promising algorithm which has comparable performance to that of the more computationally intensive OPT-RE algorithm. The energy consumption is significantly affected by the channel access method, and in this paper, we also compare the effects of the collision free TDMA and contention based CSMA/CA methods. We propose practical enhancements to CSMA/CA so that the energy consumption due to collisions is reduced. Our simulation results indicate that with the proposed enhancements contention based channel access can provide comparable performance to that of the collision free methods.

In this paper, we employ time-reversal space-time block coding (TR-STBC) in single-carrier direct sequence code-division multiple access (DS-CDMA) block transmission in the presence of multiple access interference (MAI) as well as intersymbol interference (ISI), which is subject to fairly long delay spread. We introduce the transmission rate improvement by capitalizing on the assignment of additional spreading codes to each user so as to expand the cardinality of space-time code matrix with no sacrifice of diversity order. Given perfect channel state information at the receiver, a simple linear frequency-domain interference suppression scheme on a basis of symbol-by-symbol processing is developed under certain circumstances. A "turbo principle" receiver is facilitated by exploiting the serially concatenated structure at the transmitter to further enhance system performance. Simulation results justify the efficacy of our proposed system and also present performance comparisons with some existing systems in terms of bit error rate (BER).

In this letter, we consider a class of approximately feedback linearized systems that contain both triangular and feedforward forms. With a utilization of the transformation scaling factor, we analytically show that the considered system can be globally exponentially stabilized, globally bounded, or locally stabilized depending on the shapes of triangular and feedforward forms. Our new method broadens a class of nonlinear systems under consideration over the existing results.

Rubbed polyimide films have been widely used as liquid crystal alignment films for liquid crystal displays (LCDs). We investigated the effect of rubbing on the surface molecules of polyimide films by using grazing incidence X-ray diffraction (GIXD) and reflection ellipsometry. We found that rubbing not only caused the polymer chains to align in the direction of rubbing but also to elongate near the film surface. However, the in-plane distribution of surface polymer chains of polyimide film was not found to be dependent on the rubbing conditions.

In this paper, an efficient cyclic prefix reconstruction (CPR) technique with turbo equalization is developed for multi-antenna single-carrier frequency-domain equalization (SC-FDE) systems, which are for multi-input multi-output (MIMO), space-time block code (STBC), and space-frequency block code (SFBC) applications. The proposed method includes pre-processing estimation (PPE), weighted interblock interference cancellation (WIBIC), or residual intercarrier interference suppression (RICIS). PPE is employed to compute initial values of MIMO turbo equalization and the WIBIC is developed to cancel interblock interference (IBI) at the initial iteration of the CPR for STBC SC-FDE. RICIS is used to mitigate residual intercarrier interference (ICI) after each iteration of the CPR. By applying the proposed method to the multi-antenna SC-FDE system with insufficient cyclic prefix (CP), we can significantly improve its error performance, obtaining the benefits of spectral efficiency gain and multiplexing/diversity gain in MIMO/STBC/SFBC.

Synchronization has gained attention in science recently. In electrical engineering, a power network requires generators and loads to be in synchronization. The increase in distributed dc power sources without sophisticated controls has made synchronization more difficult. This paper proposes a synchronous inverter designed for linking distributed power sources within a power network. The linkage inverters should have high confidential characteristics to keep the network stable. The frequency and phase synchronization between synchronous generators in power network has been acheived through power transmission systems. The synchronous inverters contribute in the development of the sophisticated power networks by providing distributed power sources that maintain synchronous operation.

In order to obtain better learning results in supervised learning, it is important to choose model parameters appropriately. Model selection is usually carried out by preparing a finite set of model candidates, estimating a generalization error for each candidate, and choosing the best one from the candidates. If the number of candidates is increased in this procedure, the optimization quality may be improved. However, this in turn increases the computational cost. In this paper, we focus on a generalization error estimator called the regularized subspace information criterion and derive an analytic form of the optimal model parameter over a set of infinitely many model candidates. This allows us to maximize the optimization quality while the computational cost is kept moderate.

This paper discusses design of Generalized Predictive Control (GPC) scheme. GPC is designed in two cases; the first is a dual-rate (DR) system, where the sampling interval of a plant output is an integer multiple of the holding interval of a control input, and the second is a fast-rate single-rate (FR-SR) system, where both the holding and sampling intervals are equal to the holding interval of the DR system. Furthermore, the relation between them is investigated, and this study gives the conditions that FR-SR and DR GPC become equivalent. To this end, a future reference trajectory of DR GPC is rewritten, and a future predictive output of the FR-SR GPC is rearranged.

A novel driving concept, "pulse-width modulation with current uniformization," is proposed for thin-film transistor driven organic light-emitting diode displays (TFT-OLEDs). An example of this driving concept is the combination of "pulse-width modulation with a self-biased inverter" and a "time-ratio grayscale with current uniformization." Its driving operation is confirmed by circuit simulation. It is found that this driving method can compensate the characteristic deviations and degradations of both TFTs and OLEDs and immensely improve luminance uniformity. Finally, its driving operation is also confirmed by an actual pixel equivalent circuit.

This work is concerned with the problem of robot localization using standard RFID tags as landmarks and an RFID reader as a landmark sensor. A main advantage of such an RFID-based localization system is the availability of landmark ID measurement, which trivially solves the data association problem. While the main drawback of an RFID system is its low spatial accuracy. The result in this paper is an improvement of the localization accuracy for a standard short-range RFID sensor. One of the main contributions is a proposal of a machine learning approach in which multiple classifiers are trained to distinguish RFID-signal features of each location. Another contribution is a design tool for tag arrangement by which the tag configuration needs not be manually designed by the user, but can be automatically recommended by the system. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is evaluated experimentally with a real mobile robot and an RFID system.

In this paper, we describe a new ultrasonic oscillosensor and its application in a biological information measurement system. This ultrasonic sensor has a cylindrical tank of 26 mm (diameter)20 mm (height) filled with water and an ultrasonic probe. It detects the vibration of the target object by obtaining echo signals reflected from the water surface. This sensor can noninvasively detect the vibration of a patient by placing it under a bed frame. We propose a recognition system for humans in bed. Using this sensor, we could determine whether or not a patient is in the bed. Moreover, we propose a heart rate monitoring system using this sensor. When our system was tested on four volunteers, we successfully detected a heart rate comparable to that in the case of using an electrocardiograph. Fuzzy logic plays a primary role in the recognition. Consequently, this system can noninvasively determine whether a patient is in the bed as well as their heart rate using a constraint-free and compact device.

This paper presents a middleware system for multi-agents on a distributed system as a general test-bed for bio-inspired approaches. The middleware is unique to other approaches, including distributed object systems, because it can maintain and migrate a dynamic federation of multiple agents on different computers. It enables each agent to explicitly define its own deployment policy as a relocation between the agent and another agent. This paper describes a prototype implementation of the middleware built on a Java-based mobile agent system and its practical applications that illustrates the utility and effectiveness of the approach in real distributed systems.

This paper describes a miniaturized in-phase power divider with a DC block function. We first propose three types of miniaturized in-phase power dividers composed of two distributed transmission lines, a resistor, and three capacitors to function as a DC block. Then, we use a simulation to compare the dividers. The simulation results show that, by properly selecting circuit configuration, we both achieve broadband frequency characteristics and miniaturize circuitry as compared to the conventional Wilkinson power divider with two DC block capacitors. Finally, an experimental UHF power divider fabricated to test the design concept is presented. Over the frequency range from 0.44 to 0.66 GHz, the experimental power divider exhibits power splits of -3.20.2 dB, return losses greater than 20 dB, and isolation between output ports greater than 20 dB.

This letter presents an adaptive H∞ array beamforming scheme based on a generalized sidelobe canceller with lower computational load. It is shown that the adaptive H∞-based beamformer offers the advantages of faster convergence speed, insensitivity to dynamic estimation modeling error, and less sensitivity to pointing error over the conventional adaptive H∞ algorithm. Simulations confirm that the proposed technique achieves similar array performance of the adaptive H∞-based algorithm [4].

We show the equivalence between the conventional frame synchronization in single-carrier systems and integer part estimation of frequency offset in OFDM systems and propose an efficient synchronization scheme. The proposed scheme achieves both OFDM symbol/frame timing and frequency offset estimation with only one well-designed OFDM training symbol, while previous synchronization algorithms need two OFDM training symbols at least. Numerical analysis shows that the proposed frequency estimator nearly achieves the Cramér-Rao lower bound for the variance of the frequency offset estimate, despite the reduction in the training sequence length.