New multimedia services over cellular/WLAN overlay networks require different Quality of Service (QoS) levels. Therefore, an efficient network management system is necessary in order to realize QoS sensitive multimedia services while enhancing network performance. In this paper, we propose a new online network management framework for overlay networks. Our online approach to network management exhibits dynamic adaptability, flexibility, and responsiveness to the traffic conditions in multimedia networks. Simulation results indicate that our proposed framework can strike the appropriate balance between performance criteria under widely varying diverse traffic loads.

This paper proposes a robust omnidirectional audio-visual (AV) talker localizer for AV applications. The proposed localizer consists of two innovations. One of them is robust omnidirectional audio and visual features. The direction of arrival (DOA) estimation using an equilateral triangular microphone array, and human position estimation using an omnidirectional video camera extract the AV features. The other is a dynamic fusion of the AV features. The validity criterion, called the audio- or visual-localization counter, validates each audio- or visual-feature. The reliability criterion, called the speech arriving evaluator, acts as a dynamic weight to eliminate any prior statistical properties from its fusion procedure. The proposed localizer can compatibly achieve talker localization in a speech activity and user localization in a non-speech activity under the identical fusion rule. Talker localization experiments were conducted in an actual room to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed localizer. The results confirmed that the talker localization performance of the proposed AV localizer using the validity and reliability criteria is superior to that of conventional localizers.

We present a new framework for checking safety failures. The approach is based on the conservative inference of the internal states of a system by the observation of the interaction with its environment. It is based on two similar mechanisms : forward implication, which performs the analysis of the consequences of an input applied to the system, and backward implication, that performs the same task for an output transition. While being a very simple approach, it is general and we believe it can yield efficient algorithms in different safety-failure checking problems. As a case study, we have applied this framework to an existing problem, the hazard checking in (speed-independent) asynchronous circuits. Our new methodology yields an efficient algorithm that performs better or as well as all existing algorithms, while being more general than the fastest one.

Analytical expressions based on the Gauss-Chebyshev quadrature (GCQ) rule technique are derived to evaluate the bit-error rate (BER) for the time-hopping pulse position modulation (TH-PPM) ultra-wide band (UWB) systems under a Nakagami-m fading channel. The analyses are validated by the simulation results and adopted to assess the accuracy of the commonly used Gaussian approximation (GA) method. The influence of the fading severity on the BER performance of TH-PPM UWB system is investigated.

In this letter, a computational approach for solving cross-coupled algebraic Riccati equations (CAREs) is investigated. The main purpose of this letter is to propose a new algorithm that combines Newton's method with a gradient-based iterative (GI) algorithm for solving CAREs. In particular, it is noteworthy that both a quadratic convergence under an appropriate initial condition and reduction in dimensions for matrix computation are both achieved. A numerical example is provided to demonstrate the efficiency of this proposed algorithm.

This paper proposes a new partial channel state information (CSI) reporting method for spatial scheduling in TDD/MIMO systems. In the proposed method, a terminal transmits pilot signals using transmit beams which have large channel gains between the base station (BS) and the terminal. Then, the BS can obtain partial CSI through responses of the pilot signals. Furthermore, adaptive allocation of pilot signals is proposed, in which pilot signals for CSI reporting are adaptively allocated to terminals depending on the number of terminals. We evaluate system throughput of spatial scheduling under the partial CSI reporting from multiple terminals. Numerical results show that the proposed method reduces uplink signalling for CSI reporting effectively, keeping high system throughput of spatial scheduling.

This paper studies a method for transforming ordinary cryptographic primitives to new harder primitives. Such a method is expected to lead to general schemes that make present cryptosystems secure against the attack of quantum computers. We propose a general technique to construct a new function from an ordinary primitive function f with a help of another hard function g so that the resulting function is to be new hard primitives. We call this technique a lifting of f by g. We show that the lifted function is harder than original functions under some simple conditions.

For formal verification of large-scale digital circuits, a method using satisfiability checking of logic with equality and uninterpreted functions has been proposed. This logic, however, does not consider specific properties of functions or predicates at all, e.g. associative property of addition. In order to ease this problem, we introduce "equivalence constraint" that is a set of formulas representing the properties of functions and predicates, and check the satisfiability of formulas under the constraint. In this report, we show an algorithm for checking satisfiability with equivalence constraint and also experimental results.

Our purpose is to estimate conditional probabilities of output labels in multiclass classification problems. Adaboost provides highly accurate classifiers and has potential to estimate conditional probabilities. However, the conditional probability estimated by Adaboost tends to overfit to training samples. We propose loss functions for boosting that provide shrinkage estimator. The effect of regularization is realized by shrinkage of probabilities toward the uniform distribution. Numerical experiments indicate that boosting algorithms based on proposed loss functions show significantly better results than existing boosting algorithms for estimation of conditional probabilities.

SIMD instructions are often implemented in modern multimedia oriented processors. Although SIMD instructions are useful for many digital signal processing applications, most compilers do not exploit SIMD instructions. The difficulty in the utilization of SIMD instructions stems from data parallelism in registers. In assembly code generation, the positions of data in registers must be noted. A technique of generating pack instructions which pack or reorder data in registers is essential for exploitation of SIMD instructions. This paper presents a code generation technique for SIMD instructions with pack instructions. SIMD instructions are generated by finding and grouping the same operations in programs. After the SIMD instruction generation, pack instructions are generated. In the pack instruction generation, Multi-valued Decision Diagram (MDD) is introduced to represent and to manipulate sets of packed data. Experimental results show that the proposed code generation technique can generate assembly code with SIMD and pack instructions performing repacking of 8 packed data in registers for a RISC processor with a dual-issue coprocessor which supports SIMD and pack instructions. The proposed method achieved speedup ratio up to about 8.5 by SIMD instructions and multiple-issue mechanism of the target processor.

A stacked rectangular microstrip antenna with a shorting plate is proposed as a car antenna for dual band (VICS and ETC) operation in the ITS. The proposed antenna has the proper radiation patterns for the VICS and ETC. The antenna is small in size and effective in dual band operation.

In this study, we propose a simple, yet general and powerful framework for constructing accurate affine invariant regions. In our framework, a method for extracting reliable seed points is first proposed. Then, regions which are invariant to most common affine transformations can be extracted from seed points by two new methods the Path Growing (PG) or the Thresholding Seeded Growing Region (TSGR). After that, an improved ellipse fitting method based on the Direct Least Square Fitting (DLSF) is used to fit the irregularly-shaped contours from the PG or the TSGR to obtain ellipse regions as the final invariant regions. In the experiments, our framework is first evaluated by the criterions of Mikolajczyk's evaluation framework [1], and then by near-duplicate detection problem [2]. Our framework shows its superiorities to the other detectors for different transformed images under Mikolajczyk's evaluation framework and the one with TSGR also gives satisfying results in the application to near-duplicate detection problem.

In this paper, we propose an intrablog-based informal communication encouraging system named "Attractiblog." It has been pointed out that daily informal communications at a shared public space play very important role in information sharing in an organization. However, in most cases, the communications are often mere chats. To make the communications more informative, it is necessary to feed some common and beneficial topics there. Attractiblog is a system that extracts some articles posted in an intrablog considering who are in the shared space, and show them on a large-sized display that is located in the space. Thus, Attractiblog attempts to seamlessly link on-line communications to off-line communications. We conducted user studies and confirmed that Attractiblog can achieve a natural correspondence between topics in face-to-face informal communications and issues related to the activities of an organization as given in its intrablog.

From lessons learned in medical data mining projects we show that integration of advanced computation techniques and human inspection is indispensable in medical data mining. We proposed an integrated approach that merges data mining and text mining methods plus visualization support for expert evaluation. We also appropriately developed temporal abstraction and text mining methods to exploit the collected data. Furthermore, our visual discovery system D2MS allowed to actively and effectively working with physicians. Significant findings in hepatitis study were obtained by the integrated approach.

In this paper, we shall describe about a basic theory based on the concept of set-valued operators, suitable for available operation of extremely complicated large-scale network systems. Fundamental conditions for availability of system behaviors of such network systems are clarified in a form of fixed point theorem for system of set-valued operators. Here, the proof of this theorem is accomplished by the concept of Hausdorff's ball measure of non-compactness.

This paper proposes pilot-based channel quality reporting for orthogonal frequency division multiple access/time division duplex (OFDMA/TDD) systems with cochannel interference. In the proposed method, a terminal reports his channel quality in multiple subbands to base station (BS) using channel reciprocity of TDD systems. The terminal transmits uplink pilot signals in the subbands with different transmit power which is inversely proportional to the subband-based interference power. The BS can obtain knowledge of the terminal's received signal-to-interference-plus-noise power ratio on subband basis, measuring the pilot signal power. In performance evaluation, accuracy of channel quality reporting and amount of uplink signalling are examined. From numerical results, it is found that the proposed method becomes effective as the number of subbands and terminals for channel quality reporting increases.

We investigated the radio propagation characteristics for line-of-sight (LOS) inter-vehicle communication (IVC) at 60 GHz on an actual road with an undulating surface. Radio propagation tests between two moving vehicles were carried out on a test course. From this, it was found that the measured received power on the actual road and the results calculated for a flat road approximately follow logarithmic normal distributions. To investigate this phenomenon in detail, a propagation test between two stationary vehicles on a road was performed. Furthermore, calculations using geometrical optics taking road undulation into consideration demonstrated that undulation in the road can cause variations in the received power that follow a logarithmic normal distribution. Finally, the received power for moving vehicles on an undulating road was calculated using the model.

Due to the discontinuity of packet based traffic, the user terminals in next generation mobile telecommunications systems will be equipped with sleep mode operation functions for power saving purpose. The sleep mode parameters should be appropriately configured so that power consumption can be sufficiently decreased while packet queue length and packet delay are restricted within a demanded level. This paper proposes an adaptive sleep mode parameter configuration scheme which is able to jointly optimize the inactivity timer and sleep period in response to the variation of user traffic arrival pattern. The optimization target of this scheme is to minimize mobile terminal power consumption while ensuring that the mean downlink packet queue length do not exceed a certain threshold. Results of computer simulations prove that, the presented approach perfectly manages packet queue length restriction, packet delay control and power saving in a wide range of user packet inter-arrival rates both in single- and dual-service scenarios.

Effect of dispersions of medium parameters and structure on the recording performance was systematically investigated. Moderately increased M-H loop slope is effective for obtaining higher thermal stability, smaller saturation fields, and higher resolution. It was found that the most influential factor is the dispersion in anisotropy field, Hk. Small Hk dispersion reduced the noise when exchange coupled media were used. Reduced grain size and a stacked structure of the media were expected to give a restricted gain in the signal to noise ratio.

Assessment of discovered patterns is an important issue in the field of knowledge discovery. This paper presents an evaluation method that utilizes citation (reference) information to assess the quality of discovered document relations. With the concept of transitivity as direct/indirect citations, a series of evaluation criteria is introduced to define the validity of discovered relations. Two kinds of validity, called soft validity and hard validity, are proposed to express the quality of the discovered relations. For the purpose of impartial comparison, the expected validity is statistically estimated based on the generative probability of each relation pattern. The proposed evaluation is investigated using more than 10,000 documents obtained from a research publication database. With frequent itemset mining as a process to discover document relations, the proposed method was shown to be a powerful way to evaluate the relations in four aspects: soft/hard scoring, direct/indirect citation, relative quality over the expected value, and comparison to human judgment.