This paper provides an overview of power line communication (PLC) applications, challenges and possible evolution. Emphasis is put on two relevant aspects: a) channel characterization and modeling, b) filter bank modulation for spectral efficient transmission. The main characteristics of both the indoor channel (in-home, in-ship, in-car) and the outdoor low voltage and medium voltage channels are reported and compared. A simple approach to statistically model the channel frequency response (CFR) is described and it is based on the generation of a vector of correlated random variables. To overcome the channel distortions, it is shown that filter bank modulation can provide robust performance. In particular, it is shown that the sub-channel spectral containment of filtered multitone modulation (FMT) can provide high notching capability and spectral efficiency. Reduced complexity can be obtained with a cyclic filter bank modulation approach that we refer to as cyclic block FMT modulation (CB-FMT) which still provides higher spectral flexibility/efficiency than OFDM.

In this paper we summarize the work conducted in our group in the area of E- and W-band optical high-capacity fiber-wireless links. We present performance evaluations of E- and W-band mm-wave signal generation using photonic frequency upconversion employing both VCSELs and ECLs, along with transmission over different type of optical fibers and for a number of values for the wireless link distance. Hybrid wireless-optical links can be composed of mature and resilient technology available off-the-shelf, and provide functionalities that can add value to optical access networks, specifically in mobile backhaul/fronthaul applications, dense distributed antenna systems and fiber-over-radio scenarios.

In this paper, we propose a new encoding method applicable to any linear codes over arbitrary finite field whose computational complexity is O(δ*n) where δ* and n denote the maximum column weight of a parity check matrix of a code and the code length, respectively. This means that if a code has a parity check matrix with the constant maximum column weight, such as LDPC codes, it can be encoded with O(n) computation. We also clarify the relation between the proposed method and conventional methods, and compare the computational complexity of those methods. Then we show that the proposed encoding method is much more efficient than the conventional ones.

Recent progress in research on the finite element method (FEM) for optical waveguide design and analysis is reviewed, focusing on the author's works. After briefly reviewing fundamentals of FEM such as a theoretical framework, a conventional nodal element, a newly developed edge element to eliminate nonphysical, spurious solutions, and a perfectly matched layer to avoid undesirable reflections from computational window edges, various FEM techniques for a guided-mode analysis, a beam propagation analysis, and a waveguide discontinuity analysis are described. Some design examples are introduced, including current research activities on multi-core fibers.

The k-error linear complexity of periodic sequences is an important security index of stream cipher systems. By using an interesting decomposing approach, we investigate the intrinsic structure for the set of 2n-periodic binary sequences with fixed complexity measures. For k ≤ 4, we construct the complete set of error vectors that give the k-error linear complexity. As auxiliary results we obtain the counting functions of the k-error linear complexity of 2n-periodic binary sequences for k ≤ 4, as well as the expectations of the k-error linear complexity of a random sequence for k ≤ 3. Moreover, we study the 2t-error linear complexity of the set of 2n-periodic binary sequences with some fixed linear complexity L, where t < n-1 and the Hamming weight of the binary representation of 2n-L is t. Also, we extend some results to pn-periodic sequences over Fp. Finally, we discuss some potential applications.

This paper studies spike-train dynamics of the bifurcating neuron and its pulse-coupled system. The neuron has periodic base signal that is given by applying a periodic square wave to a basic low-pass filter. As key parameters of the filter vary, the systems can exhibit various bifurcation phenomena. For example, the neuron exhibits period-doubling bifurcation through which the period of spike-train is doubling. The coupled system exhibits two kinds of (smooth and non-smooth) tangent bifurcations that can induce “chaos + chaos = order”: chaotic spike-trains of two neurons are changed into periodic spike-train by the pulse-coupling. Using the mapping procedure, the bifurcation phenomena can be analyzed precisely. Presenting simple test circuits, typical phenomena are confirmed experimentally.

It is well known that solving randomly chosen Multivariate Quadratic equations over a finite field (MQ-Problem) is NP-hard, and the security of Multivariate Public Key Cryptosystems (MPKCs) is based on the MQ-Problem. However, this problem can be solved efficiently when the number of unknowns n is sufficiently greater than that of equations m (This is called “Underdefined”). Indeed, the algorithm by Kipnis et al. (Eurocrypt'99) can solve the MQ-Problem over a finite field of even characteristic in a polynomial-time of n when n ≥ m(m+1). Therefore, it is important to estimate the hardness of the MQ-Problem to evaluate the security of Multivariate Public Key Cryptosystems. We propose an algorithm in this paper that can solve the MQ-Problem in a polynomial-time of n when n ≥ m(m+3)/2, which has a wider applicable range than that by Kipnis et al. We will also compare our proposed algorithm with other known algorithms. Moreover, we implemented this algorithm with Magma and solved the MQ-Problem of m=28 and n=504, and it takes 78.7 seconds on a common PC.

The perceived age of a singing voice is the age of the singer as perceived by the listener, and is one of the notable characteristics that determines perceptions of a song. In this paper, we describe an investigation of acoustic features that have an effect on the perceived age, and a novel voice timbre control technique based on the perceived age for singing voice conversion (SVC). Singers can sing expressively by controlling prosody and voice timbre, but the varieties of voices that singers can produce are limited by physical constraints. Previous work has attempted to overcome this limitation through the use of statistical voice conversion. This technique makes it possible to convert singing voice timbre of an arbitrary source singer into those of an arbitrary target singer. However, it is still difficult to intuitively control singing voice characteristics by manipulating parameters corresponding to specific physical traits, such as gender and age. In this paper, we first perform an investigation of the factors that play a part in the listener's perception of the singer's age at first. Then, we applied a multiple-regression Gaussian mixture models (MR-GMM) to SVC for the purpose of controlling voice timbre based on the perceived age and we propose SVC based on the modified MR-GMM for manipulating the perceived age while maintaining singer's individuality. The experimental results show that 1) the perceived age of singing voices corresponds relatively well to the actual age of the singer, 2) prosodic features have a larger effect on the perceived age than spectral features, 3) the individuality of a singer is influenced more heavily by segmental features than prosodic features 4) the proposed voice timbre control method makes it possible to change the singer's perceived age while not having an adverse effect on the perceived individuality.

Honeycomb structures are widely used in aerospace industry because of the lightweight and durable properties they provide. Here we propose to use a honeycomb core as the wave guiding structure in Radial Line Slot Antennas (RLSAs). This paper quantifies the propagation characteristics, especially the loss due to the honeycomb. At 32GHz, by choosing the proper cell size, both good isotropy and reasonably low effective dielectric constants are realized with the honeycomb as a spacer in a radial line waveguide. To estimate the material loss factor, several methods are compared and a factor of about 0.014∼0.018dB/mm is predicted and measured. A fabricated 90cm diameter honeycomb RLSA suffers about a 3.5∼5dB loss, which coincides with the estimates using the predicted loss factor.

Pattern-avoiding permutations are permutations where none of the subsequences matches the relative order of a given pattern. Pattern-avoiding permutations are related to practical and abstract mathematical problems and can provide simple representations for such problems. For example, some floorplans, which are used for optimizing very-large-scale integration (VLSI) circuit design, can be encoded into pattern-avoiding permutations. The generation of pattern-avoiding permutations is an important topic in efficient VLSI design and mathematical analysis of patten-avoiding permutations. In this paper, we present an algorithm for generating pattern-avoiding permutations, and extend this algorithm beyond classical patterns to generalized patterns with more restrictions. Our approach is based on the data structure πDDs, which can represent a permutation set compactly and has useful set operations. We demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm by computational experiments.

A new algorithm is proposed for finding all solutions of piecewise-linear resistive circuits using separable programming. In this algorithm, the problem of finding all solutions is formulated as a separable programming problem, and it is solved by the modified simplex method using the restricted-basis entry rule. Since the modified simplex method finds one solution per application, the proposed algorithm can find all solutions efficiently. Numerical examples are given to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) helps to solve the problem of low scalability and high maintenance costs of legacy systems caused by code scattering and tangling by extracting cross-cutting concerns and inserting them into aspects. Identifying the cross-cutting concerns of legacy systems is the key to reconstructing such systems using the approach of AOSD. However, current dynamic approaches to the identification of cross-cutting concerns simply check the methods' execution sequence, but do not consider their calling context, which may cause low precision. In this paper, we propose an improved comprehensive approach to the identification of candidate cross-cutting concerns of legacy systems based on the combination of the analysis of recurring execution relations and fan-ins. We first analyse the execution trace with a given test case and identify four types of execution relations for neighbouring methods: exit-entry, entry-exit, entry-entry and exit-exit. Afterwards, we measure the methods' left cross-cutting degrees and right cross-cutting degrees. The former ensures that the candidate recurs in a similar running context, whereas the latter indicates how many times the candidate cross-cuts different methods. The final candidates are then obtained from those high fan-in methods, which not only cross-cut others more times than a predefined threshold, but are always entered or left under the same running context. The experiment conducted on three open source systems shows that our approach improves the precision of identifying cross-cutting concerns compared with tradition ones.

For the past couple of decades, the usage of the Web as a platform for deploying software products has become incredibly popular. Web applications became more prevalent, as well as more complex. Countless Web applications have already been designed, developed, tested, and deployed on the Internet. However, it is noticeable that many common functionalities are present among these vast number of applications. This paper proposes an approach based on a database containing information from previous test artifacts. The information is used to generate test scenarios for Web applications under test. We have developed a tool based on our proposed approach, with the aim of reducing the effort required from software test engineers and professionals during the test planning and creation stage of software engineering. We evaluated our approach from three viewpoints: comparison between our approach and manual generation, qualitative evaluation by professional software engineers, and comparison between our approach and two open-source tools.

In this paper, we investigate a combination scheme of subcarrier intensity-modulation (SIM) with spatial modulation (SM) for optical wireless communication. Using computer simulation, the performances of the proposed SIM/SM scheme are investigated and compared with those of the conventional SIM scheme in the additive white gaussian noise (AWGN) as well as in outdoor environment with turbulence induced fading characteristics. Numerical results show that the proposed SIM/SM scheme can outperform the conventional SIM in an environment with different spectral efficiencies. When the spectral efficiency is varied from 2bits/s/Hz to 4bits/s/Hz, an Eb/N0 gain of 2dB to 5dB is achieved, when the bit error rate of 10-5 is maintained. It shows that the employment of SM may further improve the power efficiency of SIM, when the number of subcarriers increases according to the spectral efficiency. When the spectral efficiency is 4bits/s/Hz, the SIM/SM scheme for 0.5 of log-irradiance variance in the log-normal turbulence channel shows the same performance as SIM with variance of 0.3. This means that the SIM/SM can be an alternative choice in even worse environments.

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is an important tool for designing aircraft components. FaSTAR (Fast Aerodynamics Routines) is one of the most recent CFD packages and has various subroutines. However, its irregular and complicated data structure makes it difficult to execute FaSTAR on parallel machines due to memory access problem. The use of a reconfigurable platform based on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) is a promising approach to accelerating memory-bottlenecked applications like FaSTAR. However, even with hardware execution, a large number of pipeline stalls can occur due to read-after-write (RAW) data hazards. Moreover, it is difficult to predict when such stalls will occur because of the unstructured mesh used in FaSTAR. To eliminate this problem, we developed an out-of-order mechanism for permuting the data order so as to prevent RAW hazards. It uses an execution monitor and a wait buffer. The former identifies the state of the computation units, and the latter temporarily stores data to be processed in the computation units. This out-of-order mechanism can be applied to various types of computations with data dependency by changing the number of execution monitors and wait buffers in accordance with the equations used in the target computation. An out-of-order system can be reconfigured by automatic changing of the parameters. Application of the proposed mechanism to five subroutines in FaSTAR showed that its use reduces the number of stalls to less than 1% compared to without the mechanism. In-order execution was speeded up 2.6-fold and software execution was speeded up 2.9-fold using an Intel Core 2 Duo processor with a reasonable amount of overhead.

In this paper, we apply a mutation operation based on a multivariate Cauchy distribution to fast evolutionary programming and analyze its effect in terms of various function optimizations. The conventional fast evolutionary programming in-cooperates the univariate Cauchy mutation in order to overcome the slow convergence rate of the canonical Gaussian mutation. For a mutation of n variables, while the conventional method utilizes n independent random variables from a univariate Cauchy distribution, the proposed method adopts n mutually dependent random variables that satisfy a multivariate Cauchy distribution. The multivariate Cauchy distribution naturally has higher probabilities of generating random variables in inter-variable regions than the univariate Cauchy distribution due to the mutual dependence among variables. This implies that the multivariate Cauchy random variable enhances the search capability especially for a large number of correlated variables, and, as a result, is more appropriate for optimization schemes characterized by interdependence among variables. In this sense, the proposed mutation possesses the advantage of both the univariate Cauchy and Gaussian mutations. The proposed mutation is tested against various types of real-valued function optimizations. We empirically find that the proposed mutation outperformed the conventional Cauchy and Gaussian mutations in the optimization of functions having correlations among variables, whereas the conventional mutations showed better performance in functions of uncorrelated variables.

The objective of our research is to develop a support system for creating presentation speech, especially speech that explains relations between two slides (complementary speech). Complementary speech is required between slides whose relations are difficult to understand from their contents, such as texts, figures, and tables. If presenters could notice relations between created slides that are recognized by audiences, they would prepare appropriate complementary speech at the right places. To make presenters notice slides where complementary speech is needed, our system analyzes relations between slides based on their texts and visualizes them. Four slide relations are defined and the method for detecting these relations from the slide texts is proposed. Then, analyzed relations are arranged in two-dimensional spaces that represent sequential relation and inclusive relation of their topics. The experimental results showed that most detected slide relations were the same as what examinees understood, and visualization of slide relations was useful in creating complementary speech, especially for less-experienced presenter.

This paper presents a faster one-dimensional (1-D) phase-only correlation (POC)-based method for estimations of translations, rotation, and scaling in images. The proposed method is to project two-dimensional (2-D) images horizontally and vertically onto 1-D signals, and uses 1-D POCs of the 1-D signals to estimate the translations in images. Combined with a log-polar transform, the proposed method is extended to scaling and rotation estimations. Compared with conventional 2-D and 1-D POC-based methods, the proposed method performs in a lower computational cost. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is capable of estimating large translations, rotation and scaling in images, and its accuracy is comparable to those of the conventional POC-based methods. The experimental results also show that the computational cost of the proposed method is much lower than those of the conventional POC-based methods.

In this paper, we present an average-case efficient algorithm to resolve the problem of determining whether two Boolean functions in trace representation are identical. Firstly, we introduce a necessary and sufficient condition for null Boolean functions in trace representation, which can be viewed as a generalization of the well-known additive Hilbert-90 theorem. Based on this condition, we propose an algorithmic method with preprocessing to address the original problem. The worst-case complexity of the algorithm is still exponential; its average-case performance, however, can be improved. We prove that the expected complexity of the refined procedure is O(n), if the coefficients of input functions are chosen i.i.d. according to the uniform distribution over F2n; therefore, it performs well in practice.

Faced with social problems such as rapidly aging society, the solutions have been expected in sports medicine. Humans became widely distributed on the earth from their birth by acquiring abilities to walk in an upright position and to adapt themselves to various natural environments. However, seeking a ‘comfortable environment’ in modern civilization has deteriorated these genetic characteristics of humans, and the consumption of resources and energy to acquire such a ‘comfortable environment’ has induced global warming-associated natural disasters and the destruction of social order. To halt this vicious cycle, we may reactivate the genetic characteristics in humans by doing exercise. To do this, we have developed a health promotion program for middle aged and older people, Jukunen Taiikudaigaku Program, in cooperation with the Japanese government, developed high-intensity interval walking training (IWT), and examined the physical and mental effects on 5,400 people for these 10 years. We found that IWT for 4 months increased physical fitness by 10-20%, decreased the indices of life-style related diseases by 10-20%. Since a prescription of IWT can be conducted by using an IT network system called e-Health Promotion System, the participants in the program were able to receive the prescription even if they lived remote from trainers, enabling them to perform IWT at their favored places and times, and also at low cost. Moreover, we found some single nucleotide polymorphisms closely related to inter-individual differences in the responses to IWT. Further, the system enables us to assess the inactivation/activation of genes for inflammatory responses which has been suggested to be involved in life-style related diseases. Also, the system enables us to search foods to promote health when they are consumed during exercise training. Thus, the system would have strong potential to promote health of middle-aged and older people in advanced aging society.