We recently determined the values of intrinsic spin-orbit (SO) parameters for In0.52Al0.48As/In0.53Ga0.47As(10 nm)/In0.52Al0.48As (InGaAs/InAlAs) quantum wells (QW), lattice-matched to (001) InP, from the weak localization/antilocalization analysis of the low-temperature magneto-conductivity measurements [1]. We have then studied the subband energy spectra for the InGaAs/InAlAs double QW system from beatings in the Shubnikov de Haas (SdH) oscillations. The basic properties obtained here for the double QW system provides useful information for realizing nonmagnetic spin-filter devices based on the spin-orbit interaction [2].

In the near future, decentralized network systems consisting of a huge number of sensor nodes are expected to play an important role. In such a network, each node should control itself by means of a local interaction algorithm. Although such local interaction algorithms improve system reliability, how to design a local interaction algorithm has become an issue. In this paper, we describe a local interaction algorithm in a partial differential equation (or PDE) and propose a new design method whereby a PDE is derived from the solution we desire. The solution is considered as a pattern of nodes' control values over the network each of which is used to control the node's behavior. As a result, nodes collectively provide network functions such as clustering, collision and congestion avoidance. In this paper, we focus on a periodic pattern comprising sinusoidal waves and derive the PDE whose solution exhibits such a pattern by exploiting the Fourier method.

This paper employs the nature-inspired approach to investigate the ideal architecture of communication networks as large-scale and complex systems. Conventional architectures are hierarchical with respect to the functions of network operations due entirely to implementation concerns and not to any fundamental conceptual benefit. In contrast, the large-scale systems found in nature are hierarchical and demonstrate orderly behavior due to their space/time scale dependencies. In this paper, by examining the fundamental requirements inherent in controlling network operations, we clarify the hierarchical structure of network operations with respect to time scale. We also describe an attempt to build a new network architecture based on the structure. In addition, as an example of the hierarchical structure, we apply the quasi-static approach to describe user-system interaction, and we describe a hierarchy model developed on the renormalization group approach.

Clustering technology is very important in ad hoc networks and sensor networks from the view point of reducing the traffic load and energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a new structure formation mechanism as a tool for clustering. It meets the key clustering requirements including the use of an autonomous decentralized algorithm and a consideration of the situation of individual nodes. The proposed mechanism follows the framework of autonomous decentralized control based on local interaction, in which the behavior of the whole system is indirectly controlled by appropriately designing the autonomous actions of the subsystems. As an application example, we demonstrate autonomous decentralized clustering for a two-dimensional lattice network model, and the characteristics and adaptability of the proposed method are shown. In particular, the clusters produced can reflect the environmental situation of each node given by the initial condition.

Many studies and systems that incorporate elements such as “pleasure” and “fun” in the game to improve a learner's motivation have been developed in the field of learning environments. However, few are the studies of situations where many learners gather at a single computer and participate in a game-based learning environment (GBLE), and where the GBLE designs the learning process by controlling the interactions between learners such as competition, collaboration, and learning by teaching. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to propose a framework of educational control that induces and activates interaction between learners intentionally to create a learning opportunity that is based on the knowledge understanding model of each learner. In this paper, we explain the design philosophy and the framework of our GBLE called “Who becomes the king in the country of mathematics?” from a game viewpoint and describe the method of learning support control in the learning environment. In addition, we report the results of the learning experiment with our GBLE, which we carried out in a junior high school, and include some comments by a principal and a teacher. From the results of the experiment and some comments, we noticed that a game may play a significant role in weakening the learning relationship among students and creating new relationships in the world of the game. Furthermore, we discovered that learning support control of the GBLE has led to activation of the interaction between learners to some extent.

We propose an adaptive coding algorithm for digital hologram transmission based on server-client interaction. A client can visualize various images of 3D objects from a digital hologram, which are reconstructed on different depth planes. The client's requests for reconstruction depths are sent to the server. The server adaptively encodes and transmits the same object image as the client's reconstructed image. When the client changes the reconstruction depth, only the prediction error of the new image is transmitted. Experimental results show that, in some cases, the proposed algorithm reduces more than half of the distortion at the same bitrate compared with the conventional coding technique.

This paper presents a folded surface detection and tracking method for augmented maps. First, we model a folded surface as two connected planes. Therefore, in order to detect a folded surface, the plane detection method is iteratively applied to the 2D correspondences between an input image and a reference plane. In order to compute the exact folding line from the detected planes for visualization purpose, the intersection line of the planes is computed from their positional relationship. After the detection is done, each plane is individually tracked by the frame-by-frame descriptor update method. We overlay virtual geographic data on each detected plane. As scenario of use, some interactions on the folded surface are introduced. Experimental results show the accuracy and performance of folded surface detection for evaluating the effectiveness of our approach.

This paper presents a robust framework of human-computer interaction from the hand gesture vision in the presence of realistic and challenging scenarios. To this end, several novel components are proposed. A hybrid approach is first proposed to automatically infer the beginning position of hand gestures of interest via jointly optimizing the regions given by an offline skin model trained from Gaussian mixture models and a specific hand gesture classifier trained from the Adaboost technique. To consistently track the hand in the context of using kernel based tracking, a semi-supervised feature selection strategy is further presented to choose the feature subspaces which appropriately represent the properties of offline hand skin cues and online foreground-background-classification cues. Taking the histogram of oriented gradients as the descriptor to represent hand gestures, a soft-decision approach is finally proposed for recognizing static hand gestures at the locations where severe ambiguity occurs and hidden Markov model based dynamic gestures are employed for interaction. Experiments on various real video sequences show the superior performance of the proposed components. In addition, the whole framework is applicable to real-time applications on general computing platforms.

We consider the backlight calculation of local dimming as an optimization problem. The luminance produced by many LEDs at each pixel considered is calculated which should cover the gray value of each pixel, while the sum of LED currents is to be minimized. For this purpose a specific approach called as "Sorted Sector Covering" (SSC) was developed and is described in this paper. In our pre-processing unit called condenser the source image is reduced to a matrix of much lower resolution so that the computation effort of the SSC algorithm is drastically reduced. During this preprocessing phase, filter functions can be integrated so that a further reduction of the power consumption is achieved. Our processing system allows high power saving and high visual quality at low processor cost. We approach the local dimming problem in the physical viewing direction -- from LED to pixel. The luminance for the pixel is based on the light spread function (LSF) and the PWM values of the LEDs. As the physical viewing direction is chosen, this method is universal and can be applied for any kind of LED arrangement -- direct-lit as well as edge-lit. It is validated on prototypes, e.g., a locally dimmed edge-lit TV.

We propose a novel representation called Feature Interaction Descriptor (FIND) to capture high-level properties of object appearance by computing pairwise interactions of adjacent region-level features. In order to deal with pedestrian detection task, we employ localized oriented gradient histograms as region-level features and measure interactions between adjacent histogram elements with a suitable histogram-similarity function. The experimental results show that our descriptor improves upon HOG significantly and outperforms related high-level features such as GLAC and CoHOG.

People are being inundated under enormous volumes of information and they often dither about making the right choices from these. Interactive user support by information service system such as concierge services will effectively assist such people. However, human-machine interaction still lacks naturalness and thoughtfulness despite the widespread utilization of intelligent systems. The system needs to estimate user's interest to improve the interaction and support the choices. We propose a novel approach to estimating the interest, which is based on the relationship between the dynamics of user's eye movements, i.e., the endogenous control mode of saccades, and machine's proactive presentations of visual contents. Under a specially-designed presentation phase to make the user express the endogenous saccades, we analyzed the timing structures between the saccades and the presentation events. We defined resistance as a novel time-delay feature representing the duration a user's gaze remains fixed on the previously presented content regardless of the next event. In experimental results obtained from 10 subjects, we confirmed that resistance is a good indicator for estimating the interest of most subjects (75% success in 28 experiments on 7 subjects). This demonstrated a higher accuracy than conventional estimates of interest based on gaze duration or frequency.

Continuous pen pressure can be used to operate multi-state widgets such as menus in pen based user interfaces. The number of levels into which the pen pressure space is divided determines the number of states in the multi-state widgets. To increase the optimal number of divisions of the pen pressure space and achieve greater pen pressure usability, we propose a new discretization method which divides the pen pressure space according to a personal pen pressure use profile. We present here four variations of the method: discretization according to personal/aggregation pen pressure use profile with/without visual feedback of uniform level widths and the traditional even discretization method. Two experiments were conducted respectively to investigate pen pressure use profile and to comparatively evaluate the performance of these methods. Results indicate that the subjects performed fastest and with the fewest errors when the pen pressure space was divided according to personal profile with visual feedback of uniform level widths (PU) and performed worst when the pen pressure space was divided evenly. With PU method, the optimal number of divisions of the pen pressure space was 8. Visual feedback of uniform level widths enhanced performance of uneven discretization. The findings of this study have implications for human-oriented pen pressure use in pen pressure based user interface designs.

This paper presents a framework for formalizing and detecting feature interactions (FIs) in the emerging smart home domain. We first establish a model of home network system (HNS), where every networked appliance (or the HNS environment) is characterized as an object consisting of properties and methods. Then, every HNS service is defined as a sequence of method invocations of the appliances. Within the model, we next formalize two kinds of FIs: (a) appliance interactions and (b) environment interactions. An appliance interaction occurs when two method invocations conflict on the same appliance, whereas an environment interaction arises when two method invocations conflict indirectly via the environment. Finally, we propose offline and online methods that detect FIs before service deployment and during execution, respectively. Through a case study with seven practical services, it is shown that the proposed framework is generic enough to capture feature interactions in HNS integrated services. We also discuss several FI resolution schemes within the proposed framework.

The topic of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has been gathering more and more scientific attention of late. A very important, but often undervalued area in this field is human engagement. That is, a person's commitment to take part in and continue the interaction. In this paper we describe work on a humor-equipped casual conversational system (chatterbot) and investigate the effect of humor on a user's engagement in the conversation. A group of users was made to converse with two systems: one with and one without humor. The chat logs were then analyzed using an emotive analysis system to check user reactions and attitudes towards each system. Results were projected on Russell 's two-dimensional emotiveness space to evaluate the positivity/negativity and activation/deactivation of these emotions. This analysis indicated emotions elicited by the humor-equipped system were more positively active and less negatively active than by the system without humor. The implications of results and relation between them and user engagement in the conversation are discussed. We also propose a distinction between positive and negative engagement.

Adjustment of a certain parameter in the course of performing a trajectory task such as drawing or gesturing is a common manipulation in pen-based interaction. Since pen tip information is confined to x-y coordinate data, such concurrent parameter adjustment is not easily accomplished in devices using only a pen tip. This paper comparatively investigates the performance of inherent pen input modalities (Pressure, Tilt, Azimuth, and Rolling) and Key Pressing with the non-preferred hand used for precision parameter manipulation during pen sliding actions. We elaborate our experimental design framework here and conduct experimentation to evaluate the effect of the five techniques. Results show that Pressure enabled the fastest performance along with the lowest error rate, while Azimuth exhibited the worst performance. Tilt showed slightly faster performance and achieved a lower error rate than Rolling. However, Rolling achieved the most significant learning effect on Selection Time and was favored over Tilt in subjective evaluations. Our experimental results afford a general understanding of the performance of inherent pen input modalities in the course of a trajectory task in HCI (human computer interaction).

We propose a 2D display and camera arrangement for video communication systems that supports both spatial information between distant sites and user mobility. The implementation of this arrangement is called the "surrounding back screen method." The method enables users to freely come from and go into other users' spaces and provides every user with the direct pointing capability, since there is no apparent spatial barrier separating users, unlike the case of conventional video communication systems. In this paper, we introduce two properties ("sharedness" and "exclusiveness") and three parameters (a distance and two angles) to represent the geometrical relationship between two users. These properties and parameters are used to classify the shared spaces created by a video communication system and to investigate the surrounding back screen method. Furthermore, to demonstrate and explore our surrounding back screen method, we have developed a prototype system, called t-Room. Taking into account practical situations, we studied a practical case where two t-Rooms with different layouts are connected.

In this paper, we propose an unbounded model checking method for feature interaction verification for telecommunication systems. Unbounded model checking is a SAT-based verification method and has attracted recent attention as a powerful approach. The interpolation-based approach is one of the most promising unbounded model checking methods and has been proven to be effective for hardware verification. However, the application of unbounded model checking to asynchronous systems, such as telecommunication systems, has rarely been practiced. This is because, with the conventional encoding, the behavior of an asynchronous system can only be represented as a large propositional formula, thus resulting in large computational cost. To overcome this problem we propose to use a new scheme for encoding the behavior of the system and adapt the unbounded model checking algorithm to this encoding. By exploiting the concurrency of an asynchronous system, this encoding scheme allows a very concise formula to represent system's behavior. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct experiments where 21 pairs of telecommunication services are verified using several methods including ours. The results show that our approach exhibits significant speed-up over unbounded model checking using the traditional encoding.

Exploiting vulnerabilities of remote systems is one of the fundamental behaviors of malware that determines their potential hazards. Understanding what kind of propagation tactics each malware uses is essential in incident response because such information directly links with countermeasures such as writing a signature for IDS. Although recently malware sandbox analysis has been studied intensively, little work is done on securely observing the vulnerability exploitation by malware. In this paper, we propose a novel sandbox analysis method for securely observing malware's vulnerability exploitation in a totally isolated environment. In our sandbox, we prepare two victim hosts. We first execute the sample malware on one of these hosts and then let it attack the other host which is running multiple vulnerable services. As a simple realization of the proposed method, we have implemented a sandbox using Nepenthes, a low-interaction honeypot, as the second victim. Because Nepenthes can emulate a variety of vulnerable services, we can efficiently observe the propagation of sample malware. In the experiments, among 382 samples whose scan capabilities are confirmed, 381 samples successfully started exploiting vulnerabilities of the second victim. This indicates the certain level of feasibility of the proposed method.

In this article, we introduce a new concept for the future information environment, called an "ambient information environment (AmIE)." We first explain it, especially emphasizing the difference from the existing ubiquitous information environment (UbIE), which is an interaction between users and environments. Then, we focus on an ambient networking environment (AmNE) which supports the AmIE as a networking infrastructure. Our approach of a biologically inspired framework is next described in order to demonstrate why such an approach is necessary in the AmIE. Finally, we show some example for building the AmNE.

A system which employs a stylus as an input device is suitable for creative activities like writing and painting. However, such a system does not always provide the user with a GUI that is easy to operate using the stylus. In addition, system usability is diminished because the stylus is not always integrated into the system in a way that takes into consideration the features of a pen. The purpose of our research is to improve the usability of a system which uses a stylus as an input device. We propose shortcut actions, which are interaction techniques for operation with a stylus that are controlled through a user's hand motions made in the air. We developed the Context Sensitive Stylus as a device to implement the shortcut actions. The Context Sensitive Stylus consists of an accelerometer and a conventional stylus. We also developed application programs to which we applied the shortcut actions; e.g., a drawing tool, a scroll supporting tool, and so on. Results from our evaluation of the shortcut actions indicate that users can concentrate better on their work when using the shortcut actions than when using conventional menu operations.