Employee performance appraisal is an effective way to determine the performance of the employees in an organization. A study conducted on companies in Thailand revealed that majority of the companies do not use computer-based employee appraisal system. In the traditional appraisal system, the paper-based appraisal system causes a lot of manual work, is time-consuming, not secure, not flexible, difficult to analyze the performance and see the trend of performance improvement of the employee. We have developed a web-based performance appraisal system, which provides a secure and easy way to perform the appraisal. In our system, the competencies are flexible and can be customized according to the specific job responsibility. Our system is goal-orientated as it calculates the objective scores. The system is connected to the database which is easily accessible. The first stage of our system is the 'Selection Stage' in which the managers and employees can select the competencies and objectives that they want to evaluate for performance appraisal according to the job positions. The second stage is the 'Appraisal/Evaluation Stage' where managers can rate the employees according to different priority levels of competencies and objectives. Moreover, at this stage, employees can perform self-evaluation and 360-degree evaluation for their colleagues, subordinates and managers. The final stage is the 'Development Planning Stage' where the managers and employees can compare their appraisal results, discuss and plan for future training or further steps for reaching the objectives and improving employee's competencies. From user testing, the system was found to be more efficient compared to the traditional appraisal system in the issues like: help evaluate the true abilities of employees, help employees understand organizational goals, and provide fast and effective feedback. The users found the system easy to understand and use and were more satisfied with the overall effectiveness of the system.

This paper proposes to use eye movements to characterize the performance of individuals in reviewing software documents. We design and implement a system called DRESREM, which measures and records eye movements of document reviewers. Based on the eye movements captured by eye tracking device, the system computes the line number of the document that the reviewer is currently looking at. The system can also record and play back how the eyes moved during the review process. To evaluate the effectiveness of the system we conducted an experiment to analyze 30 processes of source code review (6 programs, 5 subjects) using the system. As a result, we have identified a particular pattern, called scan, in the subject's eye movements. Quantitative analysis showed that reviewers who did not spend enough time on the scan took more time to find defects on average.

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.

Broadcast and synchronization techniques are used for cache coherence control in conventional larger scale snoop-based SMP systems. The penalty for synchronization is directly proportional to system size. Meanwhile, advances in LSI technology now enable placing a memory controller on a CPU die. The latency to access directly linked memory is drastically reduced by an on-die controller. Developing an enterprise server system with these CPUs allows us an opportunity to achieve higher performance. Though the penalty of synchronization is counted whenever a cache miss occurs, it is necessary to improve the coherence method to receive the full benefit of this effect. In this paper, we demonstrate a coherence directory organization that fits into DSM enterprise server systems. Originally, a directory-based method was adopted in high performance computing systems because of its huge scalability in comparison with snoop-based method. Though directory capacity miss and long directory access latency are the major problems of this method, the relaxed scalability requirement of enterprise servers is advantageous to us to solve these problems along with an advanced LSI technology. Our proposed directory solves both problems by implementing a full bit vector level map of the coherence directory on an LSI chip. Our experimental results validate that a system controlled by our proposed directory can surpass a snoop-based system in performance even without applying data localization optimization to an online transaction processing (OLTP) workload.

Apart from magnetic random access memories (MRAM), nonvolatile memories cannot be used without causing fatigue. As the use of MRAMs can solve fatigue problems, MRAMs have a large potential to open up large new markets. The manufacturing cost of LSIs cannot be reduced while they have not been produced massively. To increase the size of the MRAM market, new applications, in which MRAMs create added value, are needed. A demo system that models a drive recorder was developed to introduce the novel features of MRAMs, and a 4-Mb MRAM was developed to be used in the demo system.

The digital spiking neuron (DSN) consists of digital state cells and behaves like a simplified neuron model. By adjusting wirings among the cells, the DSN can generate spike-trains with various characteristics. In this paper we present a theorem that clarifies basic relations between change of wirings and change of characteristics of the spike-train. Also, in order to explore learning potential of the DSN, we propose a learning algorithm for generating spike-trains that are suited to an application example. We then show significances and basic roles of the presented theorem in the learning dynamics.

This paper is to investigate the application of fuzzy c-means clustering to the direct identification of coherent synchronous generators in power systems. Because of the conceptual appropriateness and computational simplicity, this approach is essentially a fast and flexible method. At first, the coherency measures are derived from the time-domain responses of generators in order to reveal the relations between any pair of generators. And then they are used as initial element values of the membership matrix in the clustering procedures. An application of the proposed method to the Taiwan power (Taipower) system is demonstrated in an attempt to show the effectiveness of this clustering approach. The effects of short circuit fault locations, operating conditions, data sampling interval, and power system stabilizers are also investigated, as well. The results are compared with those obtained from the similarity relation method. And thus it is found that the presented approach needs less computation time and can directly initialize a clustering process for any number of clusters.

This paper addresses a discrete-time consensus problem with non-linear performance functions over dynamically changing communication topologies. Each agent has a performance value based on its internal information state and exchanges the performance value with other agents to achieve consensus. We derive sufficient conditions for a global consensus using algebraic graph theory.

Accompanying with the rapid popularization of portable equipments, it becomes very important to make the battery lifetime longer without increasing the battery size. Especially toward the ubiquitous computing age, long battery lifetime in a tight size limitation will be highly demanded. It will be invaluable for intelligent sensor for cars and robots, too. This paper proposes an algorithm to optimize the battery lifetime in the restriction of total size, by simultaneous analysis of operation condition of battery, buck converter, and LSI. We discuss accurate design models of those components at the same time.

With the rapid rise in the demand for location related service, communication devices such as PDAs or cellar phones must be able to search and manage information related to the geographical location. To leverage location-related information is useful to get an in-depth perspective on environmental circumstances, such as traffic conditions or weather information. To handle the large number of information and queries communication devices generate in the current ubiquitous environment, some scalable mechanism must be required. DHTs and some overlay networks supporting range search are proposed. However, these overlay networks can not process queries of geographical region search. In this paper, we propose a overlay network called "Mill" which can efficiently manage information related to the geographical location. In DHT based overlay networks, each node has responsibility to manage a part of the whole hash table. DHTs provide scalable systems and support fast search. However, DHTs are not good at solving geographical search (range search), because hash function only supports exact match. In the Mill network, each node manages a part of ID-space calculated by "Z-ordering," which represents squire surface of the earth. This structure of ID-space enables to process region queries easily and fast. And Mill supports any scale of region search. We evaluate proposed system by using traffic infomation generator called "HAKONIWA." Simulation results show that the performance of Mill is good as well as other DHT systems. In addtion, Mill provedes more efficient region search than other overlay networks supporting range search.

In this paper, a novel decentralized adaptive neural network controller is proposed for a class of large-scale nonlinear systems with unknown nonlinear, nonaffine subsystems and unknown nonlinear interconnections. The stability of the closed loop system is guaranteed by introducing a robust adaptive bound based on Lyapunov stability analysis. A radial-basis function type neural network is used in the paper. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, we performed some simulation studies. The results of simulation become very promising.

The averaged equation for an arbitrary number of oscillators coupled by nonlinear coupling scheme invented by S. Nagano, is derived. This system is invented as a model of uni-cellular slime amoeba. By using the averaged equation, we investigate the synchronization characteristics of five coupled oscillators and a large number of coupled oscillators. In particular, we present the statistical property of coupled oscillators in terms of coupling factor γ. We also investigate the effect of linear and nonlinear coupling terms for achieving synchronization, and confirm that the nonlinear coupling term plays an important role for strong synchronization than linear coupling term does.

Existing anomaly intrusion detection that monitors system calls has two problems: vast false positives and lack of risk information on detection. In order to solve the two problems, we propose an intrusion detection method called "Callchains." Callchains reduces the false positives of existing anomaly intrusion detection by restricting monitoring to the activities with process capabilities prescribed by POSIX 1003.1e. Additionally, Callchains provides an administrator information of used POSIX capabilities in sytem call execution as an indicator of risk. This paper shows Callchains' design, its implementation, and experimental results comparing Callchains with existing approaches.

A chaotic UWB communication system based on IEEE 802.15.4a is proposed for wireless connectivity applications. A compact and simple architecture is implemented by using a chaotic UWB signal and a non-coherent detection scheme. The chaotic UWB signal has noise-like characteristics in time and frequency domains and naturally wide spectrum within a limited bandwidth. The chaotic UWB signal generator is designed on two methods with the bandwidth of 3.1 to 5.1 GHz, and a baseband process is realized on an FPGA including an adaptive decision and a channel code for non-source coded data stream. The system performance is evaluated by transmitting MP3 audio/voice with 32-byte length PSDUs and measuring PERs for assessing the system sensitivity and the interferer compatibility. The proposed system can be an excellent candidate for short-range connectivity services, as well as an inexpensive system with good capability for narrow-band interferences.

We review practical case studies of a developing method of highly reliable real-time embedded control systems using a CPU model-based hardware/software co-simulation. We take an approach that enables us to fully simulate a virtual mechanical control system including a mechatronics plant, microcontroller hardware, and object code level software. This full virtual system approach simulates control system behavior, especially that of the microcontroller hardware and software. It enables design space exploration of microarchitecture, control design validation, robustness evaluation of the system, software optimization before components design. It also avoids potential problems. The advantage of this work is that it comprises all the components in a typical control system, enabling the designers to analyze effects from different domains, for example mechanical analysis of behavior due to differences in controller microarchitecture. To further improve system design, evaluation and analysis, we implemented an integrated behavior analyzer in the development environment. This analyzer can graphically display the processor behavior during the simulation without affecting simulation results such as task level CPU load, interrupt statistics, and the software variable transition chart. It also provides useful information on the system behavior. This virtual system analysis does not require software modification, does not change the control timing, and does not require any processing power from the target microcontroller. Therefore this method is suitable for real-time embedded control system design, in particular automotive control system design that requires a high level of reliability, robustness, quality, and safety. In this study, a Renesas SH-2A microcontroller model was developed on a CoMETTMplatform from VaST Systems Technology. An electronic throttle control (ETC) system and an engine control system were chosen to prove this concept. The electronic throttle body (ETB) model on the Saber® simulator from Synopsys® and the engine model on MATLAB®/Simulink® simulator from MathWorks can be simulated with the SH-2A model using a newly developed co-simulation interface between MATLAB®/Simulink® and CoMETTM. Though the SH-2A chip was being developed as the project was being executed, we were able to complete the OSEK OS development, control software design, and verification of the entire system using the virtual environment. After releasing a working sample chip in a later stage of the project, we found that such software could run on both actual ETC system and engine control system without critical problem. This demonstrates that our models and simulation environment are sufficiently credible and trustworthy.

In this paper, a computationally efficient stack-based iterative detection algorithm is proposed for V-BLAST systems. To minimize the receiver's efforts as much as possible, the proposed scheme employs iterative tree search for complexity reduction and storage saving. After an M-ary tree structure by QR decomposition of channel matrix is constructed, the full tree depth is divided into the first depth and the remaining ones. At tree depth of one, the proposed algorithm finds M candidate symbols. Based on these symbols, it iteratively searches the remaining symbols at second-to-last depth, until finding an optimal symbol sequence. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm yields the performance close to that of sphere detection (SD) with significant saving in complexity and storage.

The problem with traditional Brain Writing (BW) is that the users are restricted from viewing all sets of ideas at one time; and they are also restricted from writing down more than three ideas at a time. In this research we describe distributed experimental environment for BW which was designed to obtain better results and can thus eliminate the problems of traditional BW technique. The actual experimental system is an integration of three BW modes with mutually different features and characters. We conducted three different tests implementing this environment, and confirmed quality and quantity of ideas generated by three different groups. It was confirmed that unrestricted inputs are effective in generating a large quantity of ideas, whereas limiting the number of sharable/viewable ideas shows better tendency in some aspects. However, qualitative evaluation results were not confirmed as different functions show variant results. The evaluation of the functions that support viewing and sharing of ideas show that synergy is not always an advantage in generating ideas. The results of number of ideas in correlation with time show that 20 minutes time was appropriate to conduct BW in distributed environment.

This paper proposes a hierarchical service management system for MPLS network services. Traditionally, general management systems which have been deployed in some service providers control MPLS LSPs (e.g. RSVP-TE, LDP) and services (e.g. L2VPN, L3VPN and IP) separately. If a fault occurs in an MPLS network, the dedicated management system for MPLS LSPs can detect the fault and recognize the state of MPLS LSPs. However, it cannot detect the extent of the impact due to the fault in each service. Furthermore, its own inability to identify the affected customer means it takes some time to identify the affected customers, cooperating manually with the dedicated management system for services. Therefore, this paper proposes a new automatic correlation between MPLS LSPs and each service. In particular, this paper proposes a new algorithm for a correlation between RSVP-TE LSPs and L3VPN services. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the capacity on a correlation table and the performance searching on a correlation table, and results show this system is very scalable within real MPLS production networks. This system, with the automatic correlation, could be sufficiently deployed in real MPLS production networks.

This study introduces the fuzzy Lyapunov function to the fuzzy PID control systems, modified fuzzy systems, with an optimized robust tracking performance. We propose a compound search strategy called conditional linear matrix inequality (CLMI) approach which was composed of the proposed improved random optimal algorithm (IROA) concatenated with the simplex method to solve the linear matrix inequality (LMI) problem. If solutions of a specific system exist, the scheme finds more than one solutions at a time, and these fixed potential solutions and variable PID gains are ready for tracking performance optimization. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is demonstrated by the numerical example of a cart-pole system.

This paper proposes a soft-error model for accurately estimating reliability of a computer system at the architectural level within reasonable computation time. The architectural-level soft-error model identifies which part of memory modules are utilized temporally and spatially and which single event upsets (SEUs) are critical to the program execution of the computer system at the cycle accurate instruction set simulation (ISS) level. The soft-error model is capable of estimating reliability of a computer system that has several memory hierarchies with it and finding which memory module is vulnerable in the computer system. Reliability estimation helps system designers apply reliable design techniques to vulnerable part of their design. The experimental results have shown that the usage of the soft-error model achieved more accurate reliability estimation than conventional approaches. The experimental results demonstrate that reliability of computer systems depends on not only soft error rates (SERs) of memories but also the behavior of software running in computer systems.