We address the issue of out-of-grammar (OOG) utterances in spoken dialogue systems by generating help messages. Help message generation for OOG utterances is a challenge because language understanding based on automatic speech recognition (ASR) of OOG utterances is usually erroneous; important words are often misrecognized or missing from such utterances. Our grammar verification method uses a weighted finite-state transducer, to accurately identify the grammar rule that the user intended to use for the utterance, even if important words are missing from the ASR results. We then use a ranking algorithm, RankBoost, to rank help message candidates in order of likely usefulness. Its features include the grammar verification results and the utterance history representing the user's experience.

Utilizing a heterogeneous multiprocessor system has become a popular design paradigm to build an embedded system at a cheap cost. A reliability issue, which is vulnerability to soft errors, has not been taken into account in the conventional IC (integrated circuit) design flow, while chip area, performance, and power consumption have been done. This paper presents a system design paradigm in which a heterogeneous multiprocessor system is synthesized and its chip area is minimized under real-time and reliability constraints. First we define an SEU vulnerability factor as a vulnerability measure for computer systems so that we evaluate task-wise reliability over various processor structures. Next we build a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model for minimizing the chip area of a heterogeneous multiprocessor system under real-time and SEU vulnerability constraints. Finally, we show several experimental results on our synthesis approach. Experimental results show that our design paradigm has achieved automatic generation of cost-competitive and reliable heterogeneous multiprocessor systems.

Embedded systems are constrained by the available memory, and code-compression techniques address this issue by reducing the code size of application programs. The main challenge for the development of an effective code-compression technique is to reduce code size without affecting the overall system performance. Dictionary-based code-compression schemes are the most commonly used code-compression methods, because they can provide both good compression ratio and fast decompression. We propose an XOR-based reference scheme that can enhance the compression ratio on all the existing dictionary-based algorithms by changing the distribution of the symbols. Our approach works on all kinds of computer architecture with fixed length instructions, such as RISC or VLIW. Experiments show that our approach can further improve the compression ratio with nearly no hardware, performance, and power overheads.

Recent advances in cooperative communication and wireless Network Coding (NC) may lead to huge performance gains in relay systems. In this context, we focus on the two-way relay scenario, where two nodes exchange information via a common relay. We design a practical Superposition Coding (SC) based NC scheme for Decode-and-Forward (DF) half-duplex relaying, where the goal is to increase the achievable rate. By taking advantage of the direct link and by providing a suboptimal yet efficient power division among the superposed layers, our proposed SC two-way relaying scheme outperforms the reference schemes, including the well-known 3-step DF-NC scheme and the capacity of 2-step schemes for a large set of SNRs, while approaching closely the performance bound.

Two-dimensional (2D) communication is a novel physical communication form that utilizes the surface as a communication medium to provide both data and power transmission service to the sensor devices placed on the surface's top. In previous works, we developed 2D communication systems that utilize separated channels for data and power transmission. Though this assignment of different channels can achieve strong network performance, the sensor devices must be equipped with two or more interfaces to simultaneously receive the power and data signals, which significantly complicates and enlarges those devices. Moreover, when a channel is used for the power supply, it not only continually monopolizes the wireless frequency resource, it is also likely to cause interference with the other signal source in the case of the input power continually being sent out above a certain level. In this paper, we develop a novel 2D communication sensor system by using a single-carrier frequency for both power and data transmission, equipped with the wireless module for the two together in a compact body. To enable a sensor node that concurrently receives energy and data communication, we propose an enhancement scheme based on the IEEE802.15.4 MAC protocol standard. Through both computer simulation and actual measurement of the output power, we evaluate the performance of power supply and data transmission over the developed 2D communication sensor system.

Recently, novel full-diversity full-rate quasi-orthogonal space-time block codes (QSTBCs) with power scaling and double-symbol maximum likelihood (ML) decoding was proposed. Specifically, the codes can achieve full-diversity through linearly combining two adequately power scaled orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs). In this letter, we derive expressions for mutual information and post-processing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for a system with four transmit antennas. By exploiting these formulas, we propose three transmit antenna grouping (TAG) methods for a closed-loop system with low-rate feedback information. The TAG methods make it possible to provide an excellent error-rate performance even with a low-complexity zero-forcing (ZF) detection, especially in spatially correlated fading channels.

In quasi-synchronous frequency-hopping multiple access (QS-FHMA) systems, no-hit-zone frequency-hopping sequence (NHZ-FHS) sets are commonly employed to minimize multiple access interference. Several new constructions for optimal NHZ-FHS sets are presented in this paper, which are based on interleaving techniques. Two types of NHZ-FHS sets of length 2N for any integer N ≥ 3 are constructed, whose NHZ sizes are some even integers. An optimal NHZ-FHS set of length 2N with odd NHZ size for any integer N ≥ 6 is also presented. And then, optimal NHZ-FHS sets of length kN are given by generalizing one of the proposed constructions for NHZ-FHS sets of length 2N, where k and N are any positive integers such that 2 ≤ k < N. All the FHSs in the new NHZ-FHS sets are non-repeating FHSs which are optimal with respect to the Lempel-Greenberger bound. Our constructions give new parameters which are flexible in the selection of NHZ size and set size.

In this paper, a new framework to characterize the tradeoff between diversity and multiplexing gains of Multi Input Multi Output (MIMO) wireless systems at finite Signal to Noise Ratios (SNRs) is presented. By suitable definitions of non-asymptotic diversity and multiplexing gains, we extract a useful tool to investigate the performance of space-time schemes at finite SNRs. Exact results on the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) are derived for Multi Input Single Output (MISO), Single Input Multi Output (SIMO), and 22 MIMO channels. We show that our outcomes coincide with the Zheng and Tse's results at high SNRs. When the new definitions of non-asymptotic diversity and multiplexing gains are used, the resulted DMT converges to its asymptotic value at realistic SNRs. Furthermore, using these definitions enables the diversity gain to represent the outage probability with reasonable accuracy.

Vision sensors provide rich sources of information, but sensing images and processing them in real time would be a challenging task. This paper introduces a vision system using SoCBase platform and presents heuristic designs of SAD correlation algorithm as a component of the vision system. Simulation results show that the vision system is suitable for real-time applications and that the heuristic designs of SAD algorithm are worth utilizing since they save a considerable amount of space with little sacrificing in quality.

Recently there has been a surge of interest in construction of low correlation zone sequences. The purpose of this paper is to survey the known results in the area and to present an interleaved construction of binary low correlation zone sequences. The interleaved construction unifies many constructions currently available in the literature. These sequences are useful in quasi-synchronous code-division multiple access (QS-CDMA) communication systems.

A stacked rectangular microstrip antenna with a shorting plate and a helical pin is proposed as a car antenna for triple band operation in ITS. The proposed antenna operates as a conventional stacked microstrip antenna at the highest frequency band. At the middle and the lowest frequency bands, the antenna radiates at low elevation angles from the helical pin and the shorting plate. In this paper, as an example of triple band antennas in the ITS, an antenna is designed that supports PHS, VICS and ETC. The proposed antennas have the proper radiation pattern for each application and are small in size.

The unification problem for term rewriting systems (TRSs) is the problem of deciding, for a TRS R and two terms s and t, whether s and t are unifiable modulo R. We have shown that the problem is decidable for confluent simple TRSs. Here, a simple TRS means one where the right-hand side of every rewrite rule is a ground term or a variable. In this paper, we extend this result and show that the unification problem for confluent semi-constructor TRSs is decidable. Here, a semi-constructor TRS means one where all defined symbols appearing in the right-hand side of each rewrite rule occur only in its ground subterms.

In this letter, the cumulative distribution function (CDF) for the maxima of the OSTBC-MIMO channel capacity in a temporal interval is estimated using the first-order Rice series approximation. As the estimation of the maxima distribution using the Rice series is applicable only to Gaussian random processes, the Gaussian-approximated probability density function (PDF) for the OSTBC-MIMO channel capacity is derived from existing exact PDF (non-Gaussian). The resulting CDF for the maxima capacity is useful to design OSTBC-MIMO systems.

In disk-based storage systems, non-volatile write caches have been widely used to reduce write latency as well as to ensure data consistency at the level of a storage controller. Write cache policies should basically consider which data is important to cache and evict, and they should also take into account the real I/O features of a non-volatile device. However, existing work has mainly focused on improving basic cache operations, but has not considered the I/O cost of a non-volatile device properly. In this paper, we propose a pattern-aware write cache policy, PAW for a NAND flash memory in disk-based mobile storage systems. PAW is designed to face a mix of a number of sequential accesses and fewer non-sequential ones in mobile storage systems by redirecting the latter to a NAND flash memory and the former to a disk. In addition, PAW employs the synergistic effect of combining a pattern-aware write cache policy and an I/O clustering-based queuing method to strengthen the sequentiality with the aim of reducing the overall system I/O latency. For evaluations, we have built a practical hard disk simulator with a non-volatile cache of a NAND flash memory. Experimental results show that our policy significantly improves the overall I/O performance by reducing the overhead from a non-volatile cache considerably over a traditional one, achieving a high efficiency in energy consumption.

Design of high gain and high efficiency antennas is one of the key challenges in antenna engineering and especially in millimeter wave communication systems. Various types of planar waveguide arrays with series-fed traveling wave operation have been developed in Tokyo Tech with the special focus upon efficiency enhancement as well as reduction of fabrication cost. In this review, four kinds of single layer waveguide arrays characterized with the series fed travelling wave operation are surveyed first. To cope with the bandwidth narrowing effects due to long line effects associated with the series fed operation, authors have introduced partially corporate feed embedded in the single layer waveguide. They further extended the study to cover fully corporate feed arrays with multiple layer waveguide as well; a new fabrication technique of diffusion bonding of laminated thin plates has the potential to realize the low cost mass production of multi-layer structures for the millimeter wave application. Secondly, the novel methods for loss evaluation of copper plate substrate are established for the design of post-wall waveguide arrays where dielectric loss and conductor loss is determined in wide range of millimeter wave band, by using the Whispering gallery mode resonator. This enables us to design the planar arrays with the loss taken into account. Finally, the planar arrays are now applied to two kinds of systems in the Tokyo Tech millimeter wave project; the indoor short range file-transfer systems and the outdoor communication systems for the medium range backhaul links. The latter has been field-tested in the model network built in Tokyo Tech Ookayama campus. Early stage progress of the project including unique propagation data is also reported.

Internet computing is proposed to exploit personal computing resources across the Internet in order to build large-scale Web applications at lower cost. In this paper, a DHT-based distributed Web crawling model based on the concept of Internet computing is proposed. Also, we propose two optimizations to reduce the download time and waiting time of the Web crawling tasks in order to increase the system's throughput and update rate. Based on our contributor-friendly download scheme, the improvement on the download time is achieved by shortening the crawler-crawlee RTTs. In order to accurately estimate the RTTs, a network coordinate system is combined with the underlying DHT. The improvement on the waiting time is achieved by redirecting the incoming crawling tasks to light-loaded crawlers in order to keep the queue on each crawler equally sized. We also propose a simple Web site partition method to split a large Web site into smaller pieces in order to reduce the task granularity. All the methods proposed are evaluated through real Internet tests and simulations showing satisfactory results.

This paper presents a newly developed small-sized shaped beam base station antenna in order to reduce inter-sector interference for next generation high speed wireless data communication systems. The developed antenna realizes polarization diversity as a single small-sized antenna without decreasing the 3 dB main beamwidth compared with the conventional antenna by applying a newly designed beam shaping method. Furthermore, side sub-reflectors are newly installed in the radome to reduce the antenna beam gain in the direction toward the edge region neighboring the other sectors of the horizontal antenna pattern. By adopting this type of reflector, the diameter of the radome can be minimized at 0.65 λ, which is slightly longer than that of the conventional antenna. Both a computer simulation and a field measurement test based on an actual cellular network were conducted for the purpose of clarifying the validity of the shaped beam antenna. In the results, the CINR at the service area by the shaped beam antenna was 1 dB and 3.5 dB better than that of the conventional antenna at the median and 10% of CDF, respectively. The developed antenna will be expected to contribute to the enhancement of the quality of cellular radio systems in the future.

The principles for good design of battery-aware voltage scheduling algorithms for both aperiodic and periodic task sets on dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) systems are presented. The proposed algorithms are based on greedy heuristics suggested by several battery characteristics and Lagrange multipliers. To construct the proposed algorithms, we use the battery characteristics in the early stage of scheduling more properly. As a consequence, the proposed algorithms show superior results on synthetic examples of periodic and aperiodic tasks from the task sets which are excerpted from the comparative work, on uni- and multi-processor platforms, respectively. In particular, for some large task sets, the proposed algorithms enable previously unschedulable task sets due to battery exhaustion to be schedulable.

This paper presents latency and power modeling of an on-chip bus at the early stage of SoC design. The latency model is to estimate a bus throughput associated with bus configuration and behavioral model before the system-level modeling for a target SoC is established. The power model roughly calculates the power consumption of an on-chip bus including the power consumed by bus wire and bus logics. Thus, the bus architecture is determined by the trade-off between the bus throughput and power estimation obtained from the proposed bus model. We evaluate the target SoCs such as an MPEG player and a portable multimedia player so as to compare the estimated throughput from the proposed bus model to the result performed by a commercial system-level co-simulation framework. As the simulation results, the latency and power consumption of the proposed model shows 14% and 8% differences compared with the result from the validated commercial co-simulation tool.

The rapid growth of IT technology has enabled ship navigation and automation systems to gain better functionality and safety. However, they generally have their own proprietary structures and networks, which makes interfacing with and remote access to them difficult. In this paper, we propose a total ship service framework that includes a ship area network to integrate separate system networks with heterogeneity and dynamicity, and a ship-shore communication infrastructure to support a remote monitoring and maintenance service using satellite communications. Finally, we present some ship service systems to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework.