Japan encounters an urgent issue of “Carbon Neutrality” as a member of the international world and is required to make the action plans to accomplish this issue, i.e., the zero emission of CO2 by 2050. Our world must change the industries to adapt to the electrification based on the renewable powers. Microwave chemistry is a candidate of electrification of industries for the carbon neutrality on the conditions of usage of renewable energy power generation. This invited paper shows an example of “Microwave Pidgeon process” for smelting magnesium in which heating with burning fossil coals can be replaced with microwave energy for discussing how microwave technology should be developed for that purpose from both the academic and industrial sides.

With recent developments in machine learning technology, the predictions by systems incorporating machine learning can now have a significant impact on the lives and activities of individuals. In some cases, predictions made by machine learning can result unexpectedly in unfair treatments to individuals. For example, if the results are highly dependent on personal attributes, such as gender or ethnicity, hiring decisions might be discriminatory. This paper investigates the neutralization of a probabilistic model with respect to another probabilistic model, referred to as a viewpoint. We present a novel definition of neutrality for probabilistic models, η-neutrality, and introduce a systematic method that uses the maximum likelihood estimation to enforce the neutrality of a prediction model. Our method can be applied to various machine learning algorithms, as demonstrated by η-neutral logistic regression and η-neutral linear regression.

Conventional mechanisms proposed for enhancing quality of service (QoS) in 802.11 networks suffer from a lack of backward compatibility and fairness with and to legacy devices. In this paper, we present a cooperative mechanism, called TXOP (transmission opportunity) Exchange, that provides a legacy-neutral solution in which only stations (STAs) participating in TXOP Exchange cooperatively use their available bandwidth to satisfy their required throughputs, while other legacy devices continue to get the same throughput performance as before. Specifically, we discuss the implementation of TXOP Exchange in legacy 802.11 networks. We show that this mechanism can be realized with minor modifications to the RTS (request-to-send) frames of only the STAs participating in TXOP Exchange and without any replacement of legacy access points or STAs. We show an example of a proportional fair algorithm for fair and efficient MAC cooperation using a Nash bargaining solution (NBS). A simulation study using a realistic simulator verifies that the TXOP Exchange mechanism ensures legacy neutrality and fair and efficient cooperation even when a large number of legacy STAs coexist.