This study discusses an area-averaged incident power density to estimate surface temperature elevation from patch antenna arrays with 4 and 9 elements at the frequencies above 10 GHz. We computationally demonstrate that a smaller averaging area (1 cm2) of power density should be considered at the frequency of 30 GHz or higher compared with that at lower frequencies (4 cm2).

To enable the vision of precision medicine, evidence-based medicine is the key element. Understanding the natural history of complex diseases like brain aneurysm and particularly investigating the evidences of its rupture risk factors relies on the existence of semantic-enabled data preparation technology to conduct clinical trials, survival analysis and outcome prediction. For personalized medicine in the field of neurological diseases, it is very important that multiple health organizations coordinate and cooperate to conduct evidence based observational studies. Without the means of automating the process of privacy and semantic-enabled data preparation to conduct observational studies at intra-organizational level would require months to manually prepare the data. Therefore, this paper proposes a semantic and privacy enabled, multi-party data preparation architecture and a four-tiered semantic similarity algorithm. Evaluation shows that proposed algorithm achieves a precision of 79%, high recall at 83% and F-measure of 81%.

With the evolution of autonomous distributed systems such as smart cities, autonomous vehicles, smart control and scheduling systems there is an increased need for approaches to manage the execution of services to deliver real-time performance. As Cloud-hosted services are increasingly used to provide intelligence and analytic functionality to Internet of Things (IoT) systems, Quality of Service (QoS) techniques must be used to guarantee the timely service delivery. This paper reviews state-of-the-art QoS and Cloud techniques for real-time service delivery and data analysis. A review of straggler mitigation and a classification of real-time QoS techniques is provided. Then a mathematical framework is presented capturing the relationship between the host execution environment and the executing service allowing the response-times to predicted throughout execution. The framework is shown experimentally to reduce the number of QoS violations by 21% and provides alerts during the first 14ms provide alerts for 94% of future violations.

We address a BEMS (Building Energy Management System) to guarantee reliability of electric-power supply in dynamic uncertain environments. The building microgrid as the target of BEMS has multiple distributed power sources including a photo-voltaic power system and Electric-Vehicle (EV). EV is regarded as an autonomously-moving battery due to the original means of transportation and is hence a cause of dynamic uncertainty of the building microgrid. The main objective of synthesis of BEMS in this paper is to guarantee the continuous supply of power to the most critical load in a building microgrid and to realize the power supply to the other loads according to a ranking of load importance. We synthesize the BEMS as a reactive control system that monitors changes of dynamic uncertain environment of the microgrid including departure and arrival of an EV, and determines a route of power supply to the most critical load. Also, we conduct numerical experiments of the reactive BEMS using models of power flows in the building and of charging states of the batteries. The experiments are incorporated with data measured in a practical office building and demonstration project of EMS at Osaka, Japan. We show that the BEMS works for extending the time duration of continuous power supply to the most critical load.

Along with the sophistication of society, the requirements for infrastructure systems are also becoming more sophisticated. Conventionally, infrastructure systems have been accepted if they were safe and stable, but nowadays they are required for serviceability as a matter of course. For this reason, not only the expansion of the scope of the control system but also the integration with the information service system has been frequently carried out. In this paper, we describe safety technology based on autonomous decentralized technology as one of the measures to secure safety in a control system integrating such information service functions. And we propose its future studies.

Recommender systems (RS) exploit user ratings on items and side information to make personalized recommendations. In order to recommend the right products to users, RS must accurately model the implicit preferences of each user and the properties of each product. In reality, both user preferences and item properties are changing dynamically over time, so treating the historical decisions of a user or the received comments of an item as static is inappropriate. Besides, the review text accompanied with a rating score can help us to understand why a user likes or dislikes an item, so temporal dynamics and text information in reviews are important side information for recommender systems. Moreover, compared with the large number of available items, the number of items a user can buy is very limited, which is called the sparsity problem. In order to solve this problem, utilizing item correlation provides a promising solution. Although famous methods like TimeSVD++, TopicMF and CoFactor partially take temporal dynamics, reviews and correlation into consideration, none of them combine these information together for accurate recommendation. Therefore, in this paper we propose a novel combined model called TmRevCo which is based on matrix factorization. Our model combines the dynamic user factor of TimeSVD++ with the hidden topic of each review text mined by the topic model of TopicMF through a new transformation function. Meanwhile, to support our five-scoring datasets, we use a more appropriate item correlation measure in CoFactor and associate the item factors of CoFactor with that of matrix factorization. Our model comprehensively combines the temporal dynamics, review information and item correlation simultaneously. Experimental results on three real-world datasets show that our proposed model leads to significant improvement compared with the baseline methods.

As the capabilities and costs of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and of sensors (IoT) continue to improve, the concept of a “control system” can evolve beyond the operation of a discrete technical system based on numerical information and enter the realm of large-scale systems with both technical and social characteristics based on both numerical and unstructured information. This evolution has particular significance for applying the principles of Autonomous Decentralised Systems (ADS) [1]. This article considers the possible roles for ADS in complex technical and social systems extending up to global scales.

RTA (Response time analysis) is a popular technique to guarantee timing requirements for a real-time system, and therefore the RTA framework has been widely studied for popular scheduling algorithms such as EDF (Earliest Deadline First) and FP (Fixed Priority). While a number of extended techniques of RTA have been introduced, some of them cannot be used since they have not been proved and evaluated in terms of their correctness and empirical performance. In this letter, we address the state of the art technique of slack reclamation of the existing generic RTA framework for multiprocessors. We present its mathematical proof of correctness and empirical performance evaluation, which have not been revealed to this day.

This paper proposes a hardware configuration for uplink multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) transmissions in a distributed antenna system (DAS). The demand for high-speed transmission in the uplink has increased recently, because of which standardizations in LTE-advanced and IEEE 802.11ax networks is currently underway. User terminal (UT) scheduling on the downlink MU-MIMO transmission is easy even in unlicensed band such as those in wireless local area network (WLAN) systems. However, the detailed management of the UTs is difficult on the uplink MU-MIMO transmissions because of the decentralized wireless access control. The proposed configuration allows an antenna to be selected from an external device on the access point (AP). All AP antennas are divided into groups, and the received signal in each group is input to the amplitude detector via a directional coupler. Subsequently, the selected antenna is fed by a multiple-to-one switch instead of a matrix switch. To clarify the effectiveness of the proposed configuration, we conduct computer simulations based on the ray-tracing method for propagation channels in an indoor environment.

Certain open issues challenge the software engineering of autonomous robot software (ARS). One issue is to provide enabling software technologies to support autonomous and rational behaviours of robots operating in an open environment, and another issue is the development of an effective engineering approach to manage the complexity of ARS to simplify the development, deployment and evolution of ARS. We introduce the software framework AutoRobot to address these issues. This software provides abstraction and a model of accompanying behaviours to formulate the behaviour patterns of autonomous robots and enrich the coherence between task behaviours and observation behaviours, thereby improving the capabilities of obtaining and using the feedback regarding the changes. A dual-loop control model is presented to support flexible interactions among the control activities to support continuous adjustments of the robot's behaviours. A multi-agent software architecture is proposed to encapsulate the fundamental software components. Unlike most existing research, in AutoRobot, the ARS is designed as a multi-agent system in which the software agents interact and cooperate with each other to accomplish the robot's task. AutoRobot provides reusable software packages to support the development of ARS and infrastructure integrated with ROS to support the decentralized deployment and running of ARS. We develop an ARS sample to illustrate how to use the framework and validate its effectiveness.

This paper discusses the collection of sensor data for power distribution systems. In current power distribution systems, this is usually performed solely by the Remote Terminal Unit (RTU) which is located at the root of a power distribution network. The recent rise of distributed power sources, such as photovoltaic generators, raises the demand to increase the frequency of data collection because the output of these distributed generators varies quickly depending on the weather. Increasing data collection frequency in turn requires shortening the time required for data collection. The paper proposes the use of aggregation points for this purpose. An aggregation point can collect sensor data concurrently with other aggregation points as well as with the RTU. The data collection time can be shortened by having the RTU receive data from aggregation points, instead of from all sensors. This approach then poses the problem of finding the optimal location of aggregation points. To solve this problem, the paper proposes a Mixed Integer Linear Problem (MILP) formulation of the problem. The MILP problem can then be solved with off-the-shelf mathematical optimization software. The results of experiments show that the proposed approach is applicable to rather large scale power distribution systems.

This paper investigates an adaptive movable access point (AMAP) system and explores its feasibility in a static indoor classroom environment with an applied wireless local area network (WLAN) system. In the AMAP system, the positions of multiple access points (APs) are adaptively moved in accordance with clustered user groups, which ensures effective coverage for non-uniform user distributions over the target area. This enhances the signal to interference and noise power ratio (SINR) performance. In order to derive the appropriate AP positions, we utilize the k-means method in the AMAP system. To accurately estimate the position of each user within the target area for user clustering, we use the general methods of received signal strength indicator (RSSI) or time of arrival (ToA), measured by the WLAN systems. To clarify the basic effectiveness of the AMAP system, we first evaluate the SINR performance of the AMAP system and a conventional fixed-position AP system with equal intervals using computer simulations. Moreover, we demonstrate the quantitative improvement of the SINR performance by analyzing the ToA and RSSI data measured in an indoor classroom environment in order to clarify the feasibility of the AMAP system.

This study proposes a mathematical model of a gesture-based pointing interface system for simulating pointing behaviors in various situations. We assume an interaction between a pointing interface and a user as a human-in-the-loop system and describe it using feedback control theory. The model is formulated as a hybrid of a target value follow-up component and a disturbance compensation one. These are induced from the same feedback loop but with different parameter sets to describe human pointing characteristics well. The two optimal parameter sets were determined individually to represent actual pointing behaviors accurately for step input signals and random walk disturbance sequences, respectively. The calibrated model is used to simulate pointing behaviors for arbitrary input signals expected in practical situations. Through experimental evaluations, we quantitatively analyzed the performance of the proposed hybrid model regarding how accurately it can simulate actual pointing behaviors and also discuss the advantage regarding the basic non-hybrid model. Model refinements for further accuracy are also suggested based on the evaluation results.

In this research, we propose an effective stability analysis method to impacting systems with periodically moving borders (periodic borders). First, we describe an n-dimensional impacting system with periodic borders. Subsequently, we present an algorithm based on a stability analysis method using the monodromy matrix for calculating stability of the waveform. This approach requires the state-transition matrix be related to the impact phenomenon, which is known as the saltation matrix. In an earlier study, the expression for the saltation matrix was derived assuming a static border (fixed border). In this research, we derive an expression for the saltation matrix for a periodic border. We confirm the performance of the proposed method, which is also applicable to systems with fixed borders, by applying it to an impacting system with a periodic border. Using this approach, we analyze the bifurcation of an impacting system with a periodic border by computing the evolution of the stable and unstable periodic waveform. We demonstrate a discontinuous change of the periodic points, which occurs when a periodic point collides with a border, in the one-parameter bifurcation diagram.

We have previously introduced the static dependency pair method that proves termination by analyzing the static recursive structure of various extensions of term rewriting systems for handling higher-order functions. The key is to succeed with the formalization of recursive structures based on the notion of strong computability, which is introduced for the termination of typed λ-calculi. To bring the static dependency pair method close to existing functional programs, we also extend the method to term rewriting models in which functional abstractions with patterns are permitted. Since the static dependency pair method is not sound in general, we formulate a class; namely, accessibility, in which the method works well. The static dependency pair method is a very natural reasoning; therefore, our extension differs only slightly from previous results. On the other hand, a soundness proof is dramatically difficult.

Instruction set randomization (ISR) is a cost-effective obfuscation technique that modifies or enhances the relationship between instructions and machine languages. An Instruction Register File (IRF), a list of frequently used instructions, can be used for ISR by providing the way of indirect access to them. This study examines the IRF that integrates a positional register, which was proposed as a supplementary unit of the IRF, for the sake of tamper resistance. According to our evaluation, with a new design for the contents of the positional register, the measure of tamper resistance was increased by 8.2% at a maximum, which corresponds to a 32.2% increase in the size of the IRF. The number of logic elements increased by the addition of the positional register was 3.5% of its baseline processor.

The concept of witness hiding was proposed by Feige and Shamir as a natural relaxation of zero-knowledge. Prior constructions of witness hiding protocol for general hard distribution on NP language consist of at least three rounds. In this paper we construct a two-round witness hiding protocol for all hard distributions on NP language. Our construction is based on two primitives: point obfuscation and adaptive witness encryption scheme.

In this paper, we present a hybrid message logging protocol consisting of three modules for two-level hierarchical and distributed architectures to address the drawbacks of sender-based message logging. The first module reduces the number of in-group control messages and, the rest, the number of inter-group control messages while localizing recovery. In addition, it can distribute the load of logging and keeping inter-group messages to group members as evenly as possible. The simulation results show the proposed protocol considerably outperforms the traditional protocol in terms of message logging overhead and scalability.

In this paper, we provide a novel solution to mitigate pilot contamination in massive MIMO technology. In the proposed approach, we consider seven copilot cells of the first layer of interfering cells of a cellular network. We derive and formulate the worst-case signal-to-interference power ratio (SIR) of a typical user in both downlink and uplink of a pilot contaminated cell. Based on the formulated SIR and other considerations of the system, the total pilot sequence length, the reliability of channel estimation within the cell, the spectral and energy efficiencies are derived and formulated in downlink. The user's transmit power and the achievable sum rate are also derived and formulated in uplink. Our results show that when the cell size is reduced the pilot contamination is significantly mitigated and hence the system performance is improved.

Based on imperfect channel state information (CSI), the energy efficiency (EE) of downlink distributed antenna systems (DASs) with multiple receive antennas is investigated assuming composite Rayleigh fading channels. A new EE is introduced which is defined as the ratio of the average transmission rate to the total consumed power. According to this definition, an optimal power allocation (PA) scheme is developed for maximizing EE in a DAS subject to the maximum transmit power constraint. It is shown that a PA solution for the constrained EE optimization does exist and is unique. A Newton method based practical iterative algorithm is presented to solve PA. To avoid the iterative calculation, a suboptimal PA scheme is derived by means of the Lambert function, which yields a closed-form PA. The developed schemes include the ones under perfect CSI as special cases, and only need the statistical CSI. Thus, they have low overhead and good robustness. Moreover, the theoretical EE under imperfect CSI is derived for performance evaluation, and the resulting closed-form EE expression is obtained. Simulation results indicate that the theoretical EE can match the corresponding simulated value well, and the developed suboptimal scheme has performance close to optimal one, but with lower complexity.