Estimation of the gradient of the logarithm of a probability density function is a versatile tool in statistical data analysis. A recent method for model-seeking clustering called the least-squares log-density gradient clustering (LSLDGC) [Sasaki et al., 2014] employs a sophisticated gradient estimator, which directly estimates the log-density gradients without going through density estimation. However, the typical implementation of LSLDGC is based on a spherical Gaussian function, which may not work well when the probability density function for data has highly correlated local structures. To cope with this problem, we propose a new gradient estimator for log-density gradients with Gaussian mixture models (GMMs). Covariance matrices in GMMs enable the new estimator to capture the highly correlated structures. Through the application of the new gradient estimator to mode-seeking clustering and hierarchical clustering, we experimentally demonstrate the usefulness of our clustering methods over existing methods.

Break arcs are generated in a 48VDC resistive circuit. Circuit current I0 when electrical contacts are closed is changed from 50A to 300A. The break arcs are observed by a high-speed camera with appropriate settings of exposure from horizontal direction. Length of the break arcs L is measured from images of the break arcs. Time evolutions of the length L and gap voltage Vg are investigated. The following results are obtained. By appropriate settings of the high-speed camera, the time evolution of the length L is obtained from just after ignition to before arc extinction. Tendency of increase of the length L is similar to that of increase of the voltage Vg for each current I0.

A 1-Transistor 4-Magnetic Tunnel Junction (1T-4MTJ) memory cell has been proposed for field type of Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM). Proposed 1T-4MTJ memory cell array is achieved 44% higher density than that of conventional 1T-1MTJ thanks to the common access transistor structure in a 4-bit memory cell. A self-reference sensing scheme which can read out with write-back in four clock cycles has been also proposed. Furthermore, we add to estimate with considering sense amplifier variation and show 1T-4MTJ cell configuration is the best solution in IoT applications. A 1-Mbit MRAM test chip is designed and fabricated successfully using 130-nm CMOS process. By applying 1T-4MTJ high density cell and partially embedded wordline driver peripheral into the cell array, the 1-Mbit macro size is 4.04 mm2 which is 35.7% smaller than the conventional one. Measured data shows that the read access is 55 ns at 1.5 V typical supply voltage and 25C. Combining with conventional high-speed 1T-1MTJ caches and proposed high-density 1T-4MTJ user memories is an effective on-chip hierarchical non-volatile memory solution, being implemented for low-power MCUs and SoCs of IoT applications.

Two points x, y inside a simple polygon P are said to be mutually link-2 visible if there exists the third point z ∈ P such that z is visible from both x and y. The polygon P is link-2 LR-visible if there are two points s, t on the boundary of P such that every point on the clockwise boundary of P from s to t is link-2 visible from some point of the other boundary of P from t to s and vice versa. We give a characterization of link-2 LR-visibility polygons by generalizing the known result on LR-visibility polygons. A new idea is to extend the concepts of ray-shootings and components to those under notion of link-2 visibility. Then, we develop an O(n log n) time algorithm to determine whether a given polygon is link-2 LR-visible. Using the characterization of link-2 LR-visibility polygons, we further present an O(n log n) time algorithm for determining whether a polygonal region is searchable by a k-searcher, k ≥ 2. This improves upon the previous O(n2) time bound [9]. A polygonal region P is said to be searchable by a searcher if the searcher can detect (or see) an unpredictable intruder inside the region, no matter how fast the intruder moves. A k-searcher holds k flashlights and can see only along the rays of the flashlights emanating from his position.

In the model of no-dictionary searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) schemes, the client does not need to keep the list of keywords W. In this paper, we first show a generic method to transform any passively secure SSE scheme to a no-dictionary SSE scheme such that the client can verify search results even if w ∉ W. In particular, it takes only O(1) time for the server to prove that w ∉ W. We next present a no-dictionary SSE scheme such that the client can hide even the search pattern from the server.

Location sharing services have recently gained momentum over mobile online social networks (mOSNs), seeing the increasing popularity of GPS-capable mobile devices such as smart phones. Despite the convenience brought by location sharing, there comes severe privacy risks. Though many efforts have been made to protect user privacy during location sharing, many of them rely on the extensive deployment of trusted Cellular Towers (CTs) and some incur excessive time overhead. More importantly, little research so far can support complete privacy including location privacy, identity privacy and social relation privacy. We propose SAM, a new System Architecture for mOSNs, and P3S, a Privacy-Preserving Protocol based on SAM, to address the above issues for privacy-preserving location sharing over mOSNs. SAM and P3S differ from previous work in providing complete privacy for location sharing services over mOSNs. Theoretical analysis and extensive experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed system and protocol.

Device-to-device (D2D) communication in cellular networks is defined as direct communication between two mobile users without traversing the base station (BS) or core network. D2D communication can occur on the cellular frequencies (i.e., inband) or unlicensed spectrum (i.e., outband). A high capacity IEEE 802.11-based outband device-to-device communication system for cellular networks is introduced in this paper. Transmissions in device-to-device connections are managed using our proposed medium access control (MAC) protocol. In the proposed MAC protocol, backoff window size is adjusted dynamically considering the current network status and utilizing an appropriate transmission attempt rate. We have considered both cases that the request to send/clear to send (RTS/CTS) mechanism is and is not used in our protocol design. Describing mechanisms for guaranteeing quality of service (QoS) and enhancing reliability of the system is another part of our work. Moreover, performance of the system in the presence of channel impairments is investigated analytically and through simulations. Analytical and simulation results demonstrate that our proposed system has high throughput, and it can provide different levels of QoS for its users.

The network load is increasing due to the spread of content distribution services. Caching is known as a technique to reduce a peak network load by prefetching popular contents into memories of users. Coded caching is a new caching approach based on a carefully designed content placement in order to create coded multicasting opportunities. Recent works have discussed single-layer caching systems, but many networks consist of multiple layers of cache. In this paper, we discuss a coded caching problem for a hierarchical network that has a different number of layers of cache. The network has users who connect to an origin server via a mirror server and users who directly connect to the origin server. We provide lower bounds of the rates for this problem setting based on the cut-set bound. In addition, we propose three basic coded caching schemes and characterize these schemes. Also, we propose a new coded caching scheme by combining two basic schemes and provide achievable rates of the combination coded caching scheme. Finally, we show that the proposed combination scheme demonstrates a good performance by a numerical result.

Dai-Yuan (DY) conjugate gradient method is an effective method for solving large-scale unconstrained optimization problems. In this paper, a new DY method, possessing a spectral conjugate parameter βk, is presented. An attractive property of the proposed method is that the search direction generated at each iteration is descent, which is independent of the line search. Global convergence of the proposed method is also established when strong Wolfe conditions are employed. Finally, comparison experiments on impulse noise removal are reported to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this paper, we propose a highly efficient mobile visual search algorithm. For descriptor extraction process, we propose a low complexity feature detection which utilizes the detected local key points of the coarse octaves to guide the scale space construction and feature detection in the fine octave. The Gaussian and Laplacian operations are skipped for the unimportant area, and thus the computing time is saved. Besides, feature selection is placed before orientation computing to further reduce the complexity of feature detection by pre-discarding some unimportant local points. For the image retrieval process, we design a high-performance reranking method, which merges both the global descriptor matching score and the local descriptor similarity score (LDSS). In the calculating of LDSS, the tf-idf weighted histogram matching is performed to integrate the statistical information of the database. The results show that the proposed highly efficient approach achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art for mobile visual search, while the descriptor extraction complexity is largely reduced.

We propose a feature design method for a mobile visual search based on binary features and a bag-of-visual words framework. In mobile visual search, detection error and quantization error are unavoidable due to viewpoint changes and cause performance degradation. Typical approaches to visual search extract features from a single view of reference images, though such features are insufficient to manage detection and quantization errors. In this paper, we extract features from multiview synthetic images. These features are selected according to our novel reliability measure which enables robust recognition against various viewpoint changes. We regard feature selection as a maximum coverage problem. That is, we find a finite set of features maximizing an objective function under certain constraints. As this problem is NP-hard and thus computationally infeasible, we explore approximate solutions based on a greedy algorithm. For this purpose, we propose novel constraint functions which are designed to be consistent with the match conditions in the visual search method. Experiments show that the proposed method improves retrieval accuracy by 12.7 percentage points without increasing the database size or changing the search procedure. In other words, the proposed method enables more accurate search without adversely affecting the database size, computational cost, and memory requirement.

Datacenter growth in traffic and scale is driving innovations in constructing tightly-coupled facilities with low-latency communication for different specific applications. A famous custom design is rackscale (RS) computing by gathering key server resource components into different resource pools. Such a resource-pooling implementation requires a new software stack to manage resource discovery, resource allocation and data communication. The reconfiguration of interconnection networks on their components is potentially needed to support the above demand in RS. In this context as an evolution of the original RS architecture the inter-rackscale (IRS) architecture, which disaggregates hardware components into different racks according to their own areas, has been proposed. The heart of IRS is to use a limited number of free-space optics (FSO) channels for wireless connections between different resource racks, via which selected pairs of racks can communicate directly and thus resource-pooling requirements are met without additional software management. In this study we evaluate the influences of FSO links on IRS networks. Evaluation results show that FSO links reduce average communication hop count for user jobs, which is close to the best possible value of 2 hops and thus provides comparable benchmark performance to that of the counterpart RS architecture. In addition, if four FSO terminals per rack are allowed, the CPU/SSD (GPU) interconnection latency is reduced by 25.99% over Fat-tree and by 67.14% over 2-D Torus. We also present the advantage of an FSO-equipped IRS system in average turnaround time of dispatched jobs for given sets of benchmark workloads.

Extreme multi-label classification methods have been widely used in Web-scale classification tasks such as Web page tagging and product recommendation. In this paper, we present a novel graph embedding method called “AnnexML”. At the training step, AnnexML constructs a k-nearest neighbor graph of label vectors and attempts to reproduce the graph structure in the embedding space. The prediction is efficiently performed by using an approximate nearest neighbor search method that efficiently explores the learned k-nearest neighbor graph in the embedding space. We conducted evaluations on several large-scale real-world data sets and compared our method with recent state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results show that our AnnexML can significantly improve prediction accuracy, especially on data sets that have a larger label space. In addition, AnnexML improves the trade-off between prediction time and accuracy. At the same level of accuracy, the prediction time of AnnexML was up to 58 times faster than that of SLEEC, a state-of-the-art embedding-based method.

Nowadays, open source software (OSS) systems are adopted by proprietary software projects. To reduce the risk of using problematic OSS systems (e.g., causing system crashes), it is important for proprietary software projects to assess OSS systems in advance. Therefore, OSS quality assessment models are studied to obtain information regarding the quality of OSS systems. Although the OSS quality assessment models are partially validated using a small number of case studies, to the best of our knowledge, there are few studies that empirically report how industrial projects actually use OSS quality assessment models in their own development process. In this study, we empirically evaluate the cost and effectiveness of OSS quality assessment models at Fujitsu Kyushu Network Technologies Limited (Fujitsu QNET). To conduct the empirical study, we collect datasets from (a) 120 OSS projects that Fujitsu QNET's projects actually used and (b) 10 problematic OSS projects that caused major problems in the projects. We find that (1) it takes average and median times of 51 and 49 minutes, respectively, to gather all assessment metrics per OSS project and (2) there is a possibility that we can filter problematic OSS systems by using the threshold derived from a pool of assessment metrics. Fujitsu QNET's developers agree that our results lead to improvements in Fujitsu QNET's OSS assessment process. We believe that our work significantly contributes to the empirical knowledge about applying OSS assessment techniques to industrial projects.

Accurate visual correspondence is the foundation of many computer vision based applications. Since existing image matching algorithms generate mismatches inevitably, a reliable mismatch-removal algorithm is highly desired to remove mismatches and preserve true matches. This paper proposes a hierarchical progressive trust (HPT) model to solve this problem. The HPT model first adopts a “trust the most trustworthy ones” strategy to select anchor inliers in its bottom layer, and then progressively propagates the trust from bottom layer to other layers in a bottom-up way: 1) bottom layer verifies anchor inliers with the guidance of local features; 2) middle layers progressively estimate local transformations and perform local verifications; 3) top layer estimates a global transformation with an anchor-inliers-guided expectation maximization (EM) algorithm and performs global verifications. Experimental results show that the proposed HPT model achieves higher performance than state-of-the-art mismatch-removal methods under both rigid transformations and non-rigid deformations.

Huge amounts of software appear nowadays. The more the number of software increases, the more increased software vulnerabilities are. Although some automatic methods have been proposed in order to detect and remove software vulnerabilities, they still require a lot of time so they have a limitation in the real world. To solve this problem, we propose BugHunter which automatically tests a binary file compiled with a C++ compiler. It searches for unsafe API calls and automatically executes to the program block that have an unsafe API call. Also, we showed that BugHunter is more efficient than angr through experiments. As a result, BugHunter is very helpful to find a software vulnerability in a short time.

This paper studies a variant of the graph partitioning problem, called the evacuation planning problem, which asks us to partition a target area, represented by a graph, into several regions so that each region contains exactly one shelter. Each region must be convex to reduce intersections of evacuation routes, the distance between each point to a shelter must be bounded so that inhabitants can quickly evacuate from a disaster, and the number of inhabitants assigned to each shelter must not exceed the capacity of the shelter. This paper formulates the convexity of connected components as a spanning shortest path forest for general graphs, and proposes a novel algorithm to tackle this multi-objective optimization problem. The algorithm not only obtains a single partition but also enumerates all partitions simultaneously satisfying the above complex constraints, which is difficult to be treated by existing algorithms, using zero-suppressed binary decision diagrams (ZDDs) as a compressed expression. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is confirmed by the experiments using real-world map data. The results of the experiments show that the proposed algorithm can obtain hundreds of millions of partitions satisfying all the constraints for input graphs with a hundred of edges in a few minutes.

We discuss Nash equilibria in combinatorial auctions with item bidding. Specifically, we give a characterization for the existence of a Nash equilibrium in a combinatorial auction with item bidding when valuations by n bidders satisfy symmetric and subadditive properties. By this characterization, we can obtain an algorithm for deciding whether a Nash equilibrium exists in such a combinatorial auction.

This paper proposes methods of finding a ranked list of entities for a given query (e.g. “Kennin-ji”, “Tenryu-ji”, or “Kinkaku-ji” for the query “ancient zen buddhist temples in kyoto”) by leveraging different types of modifiers in the query through identifying corresponding properties (e.g. established date and location for the modifiers “ancient” and “kyoto”, respectively). While most major search engines provide the entity search functionality that returns a list of entities based on users' queries, entities are neither presented for a wide variety of search queries, nor in the order that users expect. To enhance the effectiveness of entity search, we propose two entity ranking methods. Our first proposed method is a Web-based entity ranking that directly finds relevant entities from Web search results returned in response to the query as a whole, and propagates the estimated relevance to the other entities. The second proposed method is a property-based entity ranking that ranks entities based on properties corresponding to modifiers in the query. To this end, we propose a novel property identification method that identifies a set of relevant properties based on a Support Vector Machine (SVM) using our seven criteria that are effective for different types of modifiers. The experimental results showed that our proposed property identification method could predict more relevant properties than using each of the criteria separately. Moreover, we achieved the best performance for returning a ranked list of relevant entities when using the combination of the Web-based and property-based entity ranking methods.

The micro-mechanism of molten pool and metal droplet sputtering are significant to the material erosion caused by breaking or making arcs especially for high-power switching devices. In this paper, based on Navier-Stokes equations for incompressible viscous fluid and potential equation for electric field, a 2D axially symmetric simplified hydrodynamic model was built to describe the formation of the molten metal droplet sputtering and molten pool under arc spot near electrode region. The melting process was considered by the relationship between melting metal volumetric percentage and temperature, a free surface of liquid metal deformation was solved by coupling moving mesh and the automatic re-meshing. The simulated metal droplet sputtering and molten pool behaviors are presented by the temperature and velocity distribution sequences. The influence mechanism of pressure distribution and heat flux on the formation of molten pool and metal droplet sputtering has been analyzed according to the temperature distribution and sputtering angles. Based on the simulation results, we can distinguish two different models of the molten metal droplet sputtering process: edge ejection and center ejection. Moreover, a new explanation is proposed based on calculated results with arc spot pressure distribution in the form of both unimodal and bimodal. It shows that the arc spot pressure distribution plays an important role in the metal droplet ejected from molten pool, the angle of the molten jet drop can be decreased along with the increment of the arc spot pressure.