With the recent advances in IoT, there is a growing interest in multi-surface computing, where a mobile app can cooperatively utilize multiple devices' surfaces. We propose a novel framework that seamlessly augments mobile apps with multi-surface computing capabilities. It enables various apps to employ multiple surfaces with acceptable performance.

As a typical surface defect of tunnel lining structures, cracking disease affects the durability of tunnel structures and poses hidden dangers to tunnel driving safety. Factors such as interference from the complex service environment of the tunnel and the low signal-to-noise ratio of the crack targets themselves, have led to existing crack recognition methods based on semantic segmentation being unable to meet actual engineering needs. Based on this, this paper uses the Unet network as the basic framework for crack identification and proposes to construct a multi-kernel convolution cascade enhancement (MKCE) model to achieve accurate detection and identification of crack diseases. First of all, to ensure the performance of crack feature extraction, the model modified the main feature extraction network in the basic framework to ResNet-50 residual network. Compared with the VGG-16 network, this modification can extract richer crack detail features while reducing model parameters. Secondly, considering that the Unet network cannot effectively perceive multi-scale crack features in the skip connection stage, a multi-kernel convolution cascade enhancement module is proposed by combining a cascaded connection of multi-kernel convolution groups and multi-expansion rate dilated convolution groups. This module achieves a comprehensive perception of local details and the global content of tunnel lining cracks. In addition, to better weaken the effect of tunnel background clutter interference, a convolutional block attention calculation module is further introduced after the multi-kernel convolution cascade enhancement module, which effectively reduces the false alarm rate of crack recognition. The algorithm is tested on a large number of subway tunnel crack image datasets. The experimental results show that, compared with other crack recognition algorithms based on deep learning, the method in this paper has achieved the best results in terms of accuracy and intersection over union (IoU) indicators, which verifies the method in this paper has better applicability.

To achieve the extreme high data rate and extreme coverage extension requirements of 6G wireless communication, new spectrum in sub-THz (100-300GHz) and non-terrestrial network (NTN) are two of the macro trends of 6G candidate technologies, respectively. However, non-linearity of power amplifiers (PA) is a critical challenge for both sub-THz and NTN. Therefore, high power efficiency (PE) or low peak to average power ratio (PAPR) waveform design becomes one of the most significant 6G research topics. Meanwhile, high spectral efficiency (SE) and low out-of-band emission (OOBE) are still important key performance indicators (KPIs) for 6G waveform design. Single-carrier waveform discrete Fourier transform spreading orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DFT-s-OFDM) has achieved many research interests due to its high PE, and it has been supported in 5G New Radio (NR) when uplink coverage is limited. So DFT-s-OFDM can be regarded as a candidate waveform for 6G. Many enhancement schemes based on DFT-s-OFDM have been proposed, including null cyclic prefix (NCP)/unique word (UW), frequency-domain spectral shaping (FDSS), and time-domain compression and expansion (TD-CE), etc. However, there is no unified framework to be compatible with all the enhancement schemes. This paper firstly provides a general description of the 6G candidate waveforms based on DFT-s-OFDM enhancement. Secondly, the more flexible TD-CE supporting methods for unified non-orthogonal waveform (uNOW) are proposed and discussed. Thirdly, a unified waveform framework based on DFT-s-OFDM structure is proposed. By designing the pre-processing and post-processing modules before and after DFT in the unified waveform framework, the three technical methods (NCP/UW, FDSS, and TD-CE) can be integrated to improve three KPIs of DFT-s-OFDM simultaneously with high flexibility. Then the implementation complexity of the 6G candidate waveforms are analyzed and compared. Performance of different DFT-s-OFDM enhancement schemes is investigated by link level simulation, which reveals that uNOW can achieve the best PAPR performance among all the 6G candidate waveforms. When considering PA back-off, uNOW can achieve 124% throughput gain compared to traditional DFT-s-OFDM.

Pedestrian detection is an essential but challenging task in computer vision, especially in crowded scenes due to heavy intra-class occlusion. In human visual system, head information can be used to locate pedestrian in a crowd because it is more stable and less likely to be occluded. Inspired by this clue, we propose a dual-task detector which detects head and human body simultaneously. Concretely, we estimate human body candidates from head regions with statistical head-body ratio. A head-body alignment map is proposed to perform relational learning between human bodies and heads based on their inherent correlation. We leverage the head information as a strict detection criterion to suppress common false positives of pedestrian detection via a novel pull-push loss. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method on the CrowdHuman and CityPersons benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves impressive performance in detecting heavy-occluded pedestrians with little additional computation cost.

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.

Massive open online course (MOOC) is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. Although there are many MOOC providers, they typically focus on the online course providing and typically do not link with traditional education and business sector requirements. This paper presents a MOOC service framework that focuses on adopting MOOC to provide additional services to support students in traditional education and to provide credit bank consisting of student academic credentials for business sector demand. Particularly, it extends typical MOOC to support academic/ credential record and transcript issuance. The MOOC service framework consists of five layers: authentication, resources, learning, assessment and credential layers. We discuss the adoption of the framework in Thai MOOC, the national MOOC system for Thai universities. Several main issues related to the framework adoption are discussed, including the service strategy and model as well as infrastructure design for large-scale MOOC service.

Volleyball video analysis plays important roles in providing data for TV contents and developing strategies. Among all the topics of volleyball analysis, qualitative player action recognition is essential because it potentially provides not only the action that being performed but also the quality, which means how well the action is performed. However, most action recognition researches focus on the discrimination between different actions. The quality of an action, which is helpful for evaluation and training of the player skill, has only received little attention so far. The vital problems in qualitative action recognition include occlusion, small inter-class difference and various kinds of appearance caused by the player change. This paper proposes a 3D global and multi-view local features combination based recognition framework with global team formation feature, ball state feature and abrupt pose features. The above problems are solved by the combination of 3D global features (which hide the unstable and incomplete 2D motion feature caused by occlusion) and the multi-view local features (which get detailed local motion features of body parts in multiple viewpoints). Firstly, the team formation extracts the 3D trajectories from the whole team members rather than a single target player. This proposal focuses more on the entire feature while eliminating the personal effect. Secondly, the ball motion state feature extracts features from the 3D ball trajectory. The ball motion is not affected by the personal appearance, so this proposal ignores the influence of the players appearance and makes it more robust to target player change. At last, the abrupt pose feature consists of two parts: the abrupt hit frame pose (which extracts the contour shape of the player's pose at the hit time) and abrupt pose variation (which extracts the pose variation between the preparation pose and ending pose during the action). These two features make difference of each action quality more distinguishable by focusing on the motion standard and stability between different quality actions. Experiments are conducted on game videos from the Semifinal and Final Game of 2014 Japan Inter High School Games of Men's Volleyball in Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium. The experimental results show the accuracy achieves 97.26%, improving 11.33% for action discrimination and 91.76%, and improving 13.72% for action quality evaluation.

This paper presents a concept of a domain-specific framework for software analytics by enabling querying, modeling, and integration of heterogeneous software repositories. The framework adheres to a multi-layered abstraction mechanism that consists of domain-specific operators. We showcased the potential of this approach by employing a case study.

In GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) Distributed Simulation Environment (GDSE), the simulation task could be designed with the sharing models on the Internet. However, too much information and relation of model need to be managed in GDSE. Especially if there is a large quantity of sharing models, the model retrieval would be an extremely complex project. For meeting management demand of GDSE and improving the model retrieval efficiency, the characteristics of service simulation model are analysed firstly. A semantic management method of simulation model is proposed, and a model management architecture is designed. Compared with traditional retrieval way, it takes less retrieval time and has a higher accuracy result. The simulation results show that retrieval in the semantic management module has a good ability on understanding user needs, and helps user obtain appropriate model rapidly. It improves the efficiency of simulation tasks design.

In recent years, networking has spread substantially owing to the rapid developments made in Information & Communication Technology (ICT). It has also become easy to share highly contextual data and information, including ideas, among people. On the other hand, there exists information that cannot be expressed in words (tacit knowledge) and useful knowledge or know-how that is not shared well in an organization. The idea generation method enables the expression of explicit knowledge, which enables the expression of tacit knowledge by words, and can utilize explicit knowledge as know-how in organizations. We propose an idea generation consistent support system, GUNGEN-Web II. This system has suggestion functions for a concrete idea label and a concrete island name. The suggestion functions convey an idea and the island name to other participants more precisely. This system also has an illustration support function and a document support function. In this study, we aimed to improve the quality of the sentence obtained using the KJ method. We compared the results of our proposed systems with conventional GUNGEN-Web by conducting experiments. The results are as follows: The evaluation of the sentence of GUNGEN-Web II was significantly different to those obtained using the conventional GUNGEN-Web.

Creating an ontology from multidisciplinary knowledge is a challenge because it needs a number of various domain experts to collaborate in knowledge construction and verify the semantic meanings of the cross-domain concepts. Confusions and misinterpretations of concepts during knowledge creation are usually caused by having different perspectives and different business goals from different domain experts. In this paper, we propose a community-driven ontology-based application management (CD-OAM) framework that provides a collaborative environment with supporting features to enable collaborative knowledge creation. It can also reduce confusions and misinterpretations among domain stakeholders during knowledge construction process. We selected one of the multidisciplinary domains, which is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for our scenario-based knowledge construction. Constructing the LCA knowledge requires many concepts from various fields including environment protection, economic development, social development, etc. The output of this collaborative knowledge construction is called MLCA (multidisciplinary LCA) ontology. Based on our scenario-based experiment, it shows that CD-OAM framework can support the collaborative activities for MLCA knowledge construction and also reduce confusions and misinterpretations of cross-domain concepts that usually presents in general approach.

This paper proposes a sequentially iterative equalizer based on Kalman filtering and smoothing (SIEKFS) for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems under frequency selective fading channels. In the proposed SIEKFS, an iteration consists of sequentially executed subiterations, and each subiteration performs equalization and detection procedures of the symbols transmitted from a specific transmit antenna. During this subiteration, all available observations for the transmission block are utilized in the equalization procedures. Furthermore, the entire soft estimate of the desired symbols to be detected does not participate in the equalization procedures of the desired symbols, i.e., the proposed SIEKFS performs input-by-input equalization procedures for a priori information nulling. Therefore, compared with the original iterative equalizer based on Kalman filtering and smoothing, which performs symbol-by-symbol equalization procedures, the proposed SIEKFS can also perform iterative equalization based on the Kalman framework and turbo principle, with a significant reduction in computation complexity. Simulation results verify that the proposed SIEKFS achieves suboptimum error performance as the size of the antenna configuration and the number of iterations increase.

The Smart City paradigm has become one of the most important research topics around the globe. Particularly in Europe, it is considered as a solution for the unstoppable increase of high density urban environments and the European Commission has included the Smart City research as one of the key objectives for the FP7 (Seventh Framework Program) and H2020 (Horizon 2020) research initiatives. As a result, a considerable amount of quality research, with particular emphasis on information and communication technologies, has been produced. In this paper, we review the current efforts dedicated in Europe to this research topic. Particular attention is paid in the review to the platforms and infrastructure technologies adopted to introduce the Internet of Things into the city, taking into account the constraints and harshness of urban environments. Furthermore, this paper also considers the efforts in the experimental perspective, which includes the review of existing Smart City testbeds, part of wider European initiatives such as FIRE (Future Internet Research and Experimentation) and FIWARE. Last but not least, the main efforts in providing interoperability between the different experimental facilities are also presented.

Wireless technologies that offer high data rate are generally energy-consuming ones while low-energy technologies commonly provide low data rate. Both kinds of technologies have been integrated in a single mobile device for different services. Therefore, if the service does not always require high data rate, the low energy technology, i.e., Bluetooth, can be used instead of the energy-consuming one, i.e., Wi-Fi, for saving energy. It is obvious that energy savings are maximized by turning the unused technology off. However, when active sessions of ongoing services migrate between different technologies, the network-layer connectivity must be maintained, or a vertical handover (VHO) between different networks is required. Moreover, when the networks are not interconnected, the VHO must be fully controlled by the device itself. The device typically navigates traffic through the firmware of the wireless network interface cards (WNIC) using their drivers, which are dependent on the vendors. To control the traffic navigation between WNICs without any modification of the WNICs' drivers, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) can be applied locally on the mobile device, the so called local SDN. In the local SDN architecture, a local SDN controller (SDNC) is used to control a virtual OpenFlow switch, which turns WNICs into its switch ports. Although the SDNC can navigate the traffic, it lacks the global view of the network topology. Hence, to correctly navigate traffic in a VHO process, an extended SDN controller (extSDNC) was proposed in a previous work. With the extSDNC, the SDNC can perform VHO based on a link layer trigger but with a significant packet loss rate. Therefore, in this paper, a framework named esVHO is proposed that executes VHO at the network layer to reduce the packet loss rate and reduce energy consumption. Experiments on VHO performance prove that esVHO can reduce the packet loss rate considerably. Moreover, the results of an energy saving experiment show that esVHO performs high energy saving up to 4.89 times compared to the others.

Smart education environment, that is a learning environment utilizing the Information Communication Technology (ICT), has attracted a great deal of attention. In order to expand this environment, we need a system that can establish the learning environment armed cloud systems to reduce a significant strain on teaching staff. The important issue for such system is extensibility because the system should be adapted to many kinds of original digital learning material with minimum modification. Therefore, this paper proposes “An Application Framework for Smart Education System: SES Framework”. In this Smart Education System, multi-aspect information concerning to a technical term embedded in the original digital learning material can be retrieved from different social media automatically. They can be also displayed on multi-screen devices according to user's operation. It is implemented based on “Transforming Model” which enables the migration of the original digital learning material to the smart education environment. It also has an easy operation flow for trainees named “three-step selection flow”. SES Framework derived from Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern is based on the system architecture that enables triple mashup against the original digital learning material, external social media, and screen devices in front of users. All these functionalities have been implemented on cloud systems. We show SES Framework through the implementation example. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of SES Framework by indicating the system modification case study.

With rapid increase of the number of applications as well as the sizes of data, multi-query processing on the MapReduce framework has gained much attention. Meanwhile, there have been much interest in skyline query processing due to its power of multi-criteria decision making and analysis. Recently, there have been attempts to optimize multi-query processing in MapReduce. However, they are not appropriate to process multiple skyline queries efficiently and they also require modifications of the Hadoop internals. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for processing multi-skyline queries with MapReduce without any modification of the Hadoop internals. Through various experiments, we show that our approach outperforms previous studies by orders of magnitude.

Wi-Fi Direct is a promising and available technology for device-to-device (D2D) proximity communications. To improve the performances of Wi-Fi Direct communication, optimized radio resource allocations are important. This paper proposes network assisted Wi-Fi Direct (NAWD), which operates based on the media independent services framework of IEEE 802.21 standard, for optimizing radio resource allocations. The NAWD is enhanced Wi-Fi Direct with the assistance of infrastructure networks (e.g., cellular network) and allocates radio resources (e.g., frequency channels and transmit power) to reduce radio interferences among Wi-Fi Direct devices (e.g., smart phones and set-top boxes). The NAWD includes mechanisms for gathering configuration information (e.g., location information and network connection information) of Wi-Fi Direct devices and allocating optimized radio resources (e.g., frequency channels and transmit power) to reduce radio interferences among Wi-Fi Direct devices. Simulation results show that the proposed NAWD increases significantly SINR, power efficiency, and areal capacity compared to legacy Wi-Fi Direct, where areal capacity is total traffic throughput per unit area.

To analyze large-scale data efficiently, studies on Hadoop, one of the most popular MapReduce frameworks, have been actively done. Meanwhile, most of the large-scale data analysis applications, e.g., data clustering, are required to do the same map and reduce functions repeatedly. However, Hadoop cannot provide an optimal performance for iterative MapReduce jobs because it derives a result by doing one phase of map and reduce functions. To solve the problems, in this paper, we propose a new efficient resource management framework for iterative MapReduce processing in large-scale data analysis. For this, we first design an iterative job state-machine for managing the iterative MapReduce jobs. Secondly, we propose an invariant data caching mechanism for reducing the I/O costs of data accesses. Thirdly, we propose an iterative resource management technique for efficiently managing the resources of a Hadoop cluster. Fourthly, we devise a stop condition check mechanism for preventing unnecessary computation. Finally, we show the performance superiority of the proposed framework by comparing it with the existing frameworks.

In this paper, a Boolean algebra approach is proposed to encode various acceptability semantics for abstract argumentation frameworks, where each semantics can be equivalently encoded into several Boolean constraint models based on Boolean matrices and a family of Boolean operations between them. Then, we show that these models can be easily translated into logic programs, and can be solved by a constraint solver over Boolean variables. In addition, we propose some querying strategies to accelerate the calculation of the grounded, stable and complete extensions. Finally, we describe an experimental study on the performance of our encodings according to different semantics and querying strategies.

The Even-Goldreich-Micali framework is a generic method for constructing secure digital signature schemes from weaker signature schemes and one-time signature schemes. Several variations are known due to properties demanded on the underlying building blocks. It is in particular interesting when the underlying signature scheme is a so-called F-signature scheme that admits different message spaces for signing and verification. In this paper we overview these variations in the literature and add a new one to the bucket.