One key to implementing the smart city is letting the smart space know where and how many people are. The visual method is a scheme to recognize people with high accuracy, but concerns arise regarding potential privacy leakage and user nonacceptance. Besides, being functional in a limited environment in an emergency should also be considered. We propose a real-time people counting and tracking system based on a millimeter wave radar (mmWave) as an alternative to the optical solutions in a restaurant. The proposed method consists of four main procedures. First, capture the point cloud of obstacles and generate them using a low-cost, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) mmWave radar. Next, cluster the individual point with similar properties. Then the same people in sequential frames would be associated with the tracking algorithm. Finally, the estimated people would be counted, tracked, and shown in the next frame. The experiment results show that our proposed system provided a median position error of 0.17 m and counting accuracy of 83.5% for ten insiders in various scenarios in an actual restaurant environment. In addition, the real-time estimation and visualization of people's numbers and positions show a potential capability to help prevent crowds during the pandemic of Covid-19 and analyze customer visitation patterns for efficient management and target marketing.

Neuromorphic computing with a spiking neural network (SNN) is expected to provide a complement or alternative to deep learning in the future. The challenge is to develop optimal SNN models, algorithms, and engineering technologies for real use cases. As a potential use cases for neuromorphic computing, we have investigated a person monitoring and worker support with a video surveillance system, given its status as a proven deep neural network (DNN) use case. In the future, to increase the number of cameras in such a system, we will need a scalable approach that embeds only a few neuromorphic devices in a camera. Specifically, this will require a shallow SNN model that can be implemented in a few neuromorphic devices while providing a high recognition accuracy comparable to a DNN with the same configuration. A shallow SNN was built by converting ResNet, a proven DNN for image recognition, and a new configuration of the shallow SNN model was developed to improve its accuracy. The proposed shallow SNN model was evaluated with a few neuromorphic devices, and it achieved a recognition accuracy of more than 80% with about 1/130 less energy consumption than that of a GPU with the same configuration of DNN as that of SNN.

Energy management in buildings is vital for reducing electricity costs and maximizing the comfort of occupants. Excess solar generation can be used by combining a battery storage system and a heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system so that occupants feel comfortable. Despite several studies on the scheduling of appliances, batteries, and HVAC, comprehensive and time scalable approaches are required that integrate such predictive information as renewable generation and thermal comfort. In this paper, we propose an thermal-comfort aware online co-scheduling framework that incorporates optimal energy scheduling and a prediction model of PV generation and thermal comfort with the model predictive control (MPC) approach. We introduce a photovoltaic (PV) energy nowcasting and thermal-comfort-estimation model that provides useful information for optimization. The energy management problem is formulated as three coordinated optimization problems that cover fast and slow time-scales by considering predicted information. This approach reduces the time complexity without a significant negative impact on the result's global nature and its quality. Experimental results show that our proposed framework achieves optimal energy management that takes into account the trade-off between electricity expenses and thermal comfort. Our sensitivity analysis indicates that introducing a battery significantly improves the trade-off relationship.

In a power network, it is important to detect a cyber attack. In this paper, we propose a method for detecting false data injection (FDI) attacks in distributed state estimation. An FDI attack is well known as one of the typical cyber attacks in a power network. As a method of FDI attack detection, we consider calculating the residual (i.e., the difference between the observed and estimated values). In the proposed detection method, the tentative residual (estimated error) in ADMM (Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers), which is one of the powerful methods in distributed optimization, is applied. First, the effect of an FDI attack is analyzed. Next, based on the analysis result, a detection parameter is introduced based on the residual. A detection method using this parameter is then proposed. Finally, the proposed method is demonstrated through a numerical example on the IEEE 14-bus system.

Mobile edge computing (MEC) technology guarantees the privacy and security of large-scale data in the Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) by deploying MEC servers near base stations to provide sufficient computing, storage, and data processing capacity to meet the delay and energy consumption requirements of NB-IoT terminal equipment. For the NB-IoT MEC system, this paper proposes a resource allocation algorithm based on deep reinforcement learning to optimize the total cost of task offloading and execution. Since the formulated problem is a mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP), we cast our problem as a multi-agent distributed deep reinforcement learning (DRL) problem and address it using dueling Q-learning network algorithm. Simulation results show that compared with the deep Q-learning network and the all-local cost and all-offload cost algorithms, the proposed algorithm can effectively guarantee the success rates of task offloading and execution. In addition, when the execution task volume is 200KBit, the total system cost of the proposed algorithm can be reduced by at least 1.3%, and when the execution task volume is 600KBit, the total cost of system execution tasks can be reduced by 16.7% at most.

In this paper, a design method for an over octave hybrid continuous mode power amplifier (PA) based on modified real frequency technique (MRFT) is proposed. The extended continuous class-F/F-1 modes greatly expand the design space, which provides the possibility of over octave design, the optimal impedances at internal current-generator (I-Gen) plane and package plane are investigated. Then a novel broadband matching network based on MRFT is presented for impedance match. To verify the proposed methodology, an over octave PA with radial stub is fabricated and measured. The PA achieves a bandwidth of 133% from 0.8GHz to 4GHz, over this frequency range, the drain efficiency is 58.3-68.7% and large-signal gain is greater than 9.6dB.

In the pork fat content detection task, traditional physical or chemical methods are strongly destructive, have substantial technical requirements and cannot achieve nondestructive detection without slaughtering. To solve these problems, we propose a novel, convenient and economical method for detecting the fat content of pig B-ultrasound images based on hybrid attention and multiscale fusion learning, which extracts and fuses shallow detail information and deep semantic information at multiple scales. First, a deep learning network is constructed to learn the salient features of fat images through a hybrid attention mechanism. Then, the information describing pork fat is extracted at multiple scales, and the detailed information expressed in the shallow layer and the semantic information expressed in the deep layer are fused later. Finally, a deep convolution network is used to predict the fat content compared with the real label. The experimental results show that the determination coefficient is greater than 0.95 on the 130 groups of pork B-ultrasound image data sets, which is 2.90, 6.10 and 5.13 percentage points higher than that of VGGNet, ResNet and DenseNet, respectively. It indicats that the model could effectively identify the B-ultrasound image of pigs and predict the fat content with high accuracy.

In recent years, concerns about location privacy are increasing with the spread of location-based services (LBSs). Many methods to protect location privacy have been proposed in the past decades. Especially, perturbation methods based on Geo-Indistinguishability (GeoI), which randomly perturb a true location to a pseudolocation, are getting attention due to its strong privacy guarantee inherited from differential privacy. However, GeoI is based on the Euclidean plane even though many LBSs are based on road networks (e.g. ride-sharing services). This causes unnecessary noise and thus an insufficient tradeoff between utility and privacy for LBSs on road networks. To address this issue, we propose a new privacy notion, Geo-Graph-Indistinguishability (GeoGI), for locations on a road network to achieve a better tradeoff. We propose Graph-Exponential Mechanism (GEM), which satisfies GeoGI. Moreover, we formalize the optimization problem to find the optimal GEM in terms of the tradeoff. However, the computational complexity of a naive method to find the optimal solution is prohibitive, so we propose a greedy algorithm to find an approximate solution in an acceptable amount of time. Finally, our experiments show that our proposed mechanism outperforms GeoI mechanisms, including optimal GeoI mechanism, with respect to the tradeoff.

For many fields in real life, time series forecasting is essential. Recent studies have shown that Transformer has certain advantages when dealing with such problems, especially when dealing with long sequence time input and long sequence time forecasting problems. In order to improve the efficiency and local stability of Transformer, these studies combine Transformer and CNN with different structures. However, previous time series forecasting network models based on Transformer cannot make full use of CNN, and they have not been used in a better combination of both. In response to this problem in time series forecasting, we propose the time series forecasting algorithm based on convolution Transformer. (1) ES attention mechanism: Combine external attention with traditional self-attention mechanism through the two-branch network, the computational cost of self-attention mechanism is reduced, and the higher forecasting accuracy is obtained. (2) Frequency enhanced block: A Frequency Enhanced Block is added in front of the ESAttention module, which can capture important structures in time series through frequency domain mapping. (3) Causal dilated convolution: The self-attention mechanism module is connected by replacing the traditional standard convolution layer with a causal dilated convolution layer, so that it obtains the receptive field of exponentially growth without increasing the calculation consumption. (4) Multi-layer feature fusion: The outputs of different self-attention mechanism modules are extracted, and the convolutional layers are used to adjust the size of the feature map for the fusion. The more fine-grained feature information is obtained at negligible computational cost. Experiments on real world datasets show that the time series network forecasting model structure proposed in this paper can greatly improve the real-time forecasting performance of the current state-of-the-art Transformer model, and the calculation and memory costs are significantly lower. Compared with previous algorithms, the proposed algorithm has achieved a greater performance improvement in both effectiveness and forecasting accuracy.

The high-precision indoor positioning technology has gradually become one of the research hotspots in indoor mobile robots. Relax and Recover (RAR) is an indoor positioning algorithm using distance observations. The algorithm restores the robot's trajectory through curve fitting and does not require time synchronization of observations. The positioning can be successful with few observations. However, the algorithm has the disadvantages of poor resistance to gross errors and cannot be used for real-time positioning. In this paper, while retaining the advantages of the original algorithm, the RAR algorithm is improved with the adaptive Kalman filter (AKF) based on the innovation sequence to improve the anti-gross error performance of the original algorithm. The improved algorithm can be used for real-time navigation and positioning. The experimental validation found that the improved algorithm has a significant improvement in accuracy when compared to the original RAR. When comparing to the extended Kalman filter (EKF), the accuracy is also increased by 12.5%, which can be used for high-precision positioning of indoor mobile robots.

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation has been a primary focus of research for many years. Research on DOA estimation continues to be immensely popular in the fields of the internet of things, radar, and smart driving. In this paper, a simple new two-dimensional DOA framework is proposed in which a triangular array is used to receive wideband linear frequency modulated continuous wave signals. The mixed echo signals from various targets are separated into a series of single-tone signals. The unwrapping algorithm is applied to the phase difference function of the single-tone signals. By using the least-squares method to fit the unwrapped phase difference function, the DOA information of each target is obtained. Theoretical analysis and simulation demonstrate that the framework has the following advantages. Unlike traditional phase goniometry, the framework can resolve the trade-off between antenna spacing and goniometric accuracy. The number of detected targets is not limited by the number of antennas. Moreover, the framework can obtain highly accurate DOA estimation results.

An approach to dedicated computers is discussed in this study as a possibility for portable, low-cost, and low-power consumption high-performance computing technologies. Particularly, dataflow architecture dedicated computer of the finite integration technique (FIT) for 2D magnetostatic field simulation is considered for use in industrial applications. The dataflow architecture circuit of the BiCG-Stab matrix solver of the FIT matrix calculation is designed by the very high-speed integrated circuit hardware description language (VHDL). The operation of the dedicated computer's designed circuit is considered by VHDL logic circuit simulation.

We propose GConvLoc, a WiFi fingerprinting-based indoor localization method utilizing graph convolutional networks. Using the graph structure, we can consider the fingerprint data of the reference points and their location labels in addition to the fingerprint data of the test point at inference time. Experimental results show that GConvLoc outperforms baseline methods that do not utilize graphs.

Common schedulers for long-term running services that perform task-level optimization fail to accommodate short-living batch processing (BP) jobs. Thus, many efficient job-level scheduling strategies are proposed for BP jobs. However, the existing scheduling strategies perform time-consuming objective optimization which yields non-negligible scheduling delay. Moreover, they tend to assign BP jobs in a centralized manner to reduce monetary cost and synchronization overhead, which can easily cause resource contention due to the task co-location. To address these problems, this paper proposes TEBAS, a time-efficient balance-aware scheduling strategy, which spreads all tasks of a BP job into the cluster according to the resource specifications of a single task based on the observation that computing tasks of a BP job commonly possess similar features. The experimental results show the effectiveness of TEBAS in terms of scheduling efficiency and load balancing performance.

The BGPsec protocol, which is an extension of the border gateway protocol (BGP) for Internet routing known as BGPsec, uses digital signatures to guarantee the validity of routing information. However, the use of digital signatures in routing information on BGPsec causes a lack of memory in BGP routers, creating a gaping security hole in today's Internet. This problem hinders the practical realization and implementation of BGPsec. In this paper, we present APVAS (AS path validation based on aggregate signatures), a new protocol that reduces the memory consumption of routers running BGPsec when validating paths in routing information. APVAS relies on a novel aggregate signature scheme that compresses individually generated signatures into a single signature. Furthermore, we implement a prototype of APVAS on BIRD Internet Routing Daemon and demonstrate its efficiency on actual BGP connections. Our results show that the routing tables of the routers running BGPsec with APVAS have 20% lower memory consumption than those running the conventional BGPsec. We also confirm the effectiveness of APVAS in the real world by using 800,000 routes, which are equivalent to the full route information on a global scale.

Card-based cryptography realizes secure multiparty computation using physical cards. In 2018, Watanabe et al. proposed a card-based three-input majority voting protocol using three cards. In a card-based cryptographic protocol with n-bit inputs, it is known that a protocol using shuffles requires at least 2n cards. In contrast, as Watanabe et al.'s protocol, a protocol using private permutations can be constructed with fewer cards than the lower bounds above. Moreover, an n-input protocol using private permutations would not even require n cards in principle since a private permutation depending on an input can represent the input without using additional cards. However, there are only a few protocols with fewer than n cards. Recently, Abe et al. extended Watanabe et al.'s protocol and proposed an n-input majority voting protocol with n cards and n + ⌊n/2⌋ + 1 private permutations. This paper proposes an n-input majority voting protocol with ⌈n/2⌉ + 1 cards and 2n-1 private permutations, which is also obtained by extending Watanabe et al.'s protocol. Compared with Abe et al.'s protocol, although the number of private permutations increases by about n/2, the number of cards is reduced by about n/2. In addition, unlike Abe et al.'s protocol, our protocol includes Watanabe et al.'s protocol as a special case where n=3.

We present a negative result of fuzzy extractors with computational security. Specifically, we show that, under a computational condition, a computational fuzzy extractor implies the existence of an information-theoretic fuzzy extractor with slightly weaker parameters. Our result implies that to circumvent the limitations of information-theoretic fuzzy extractors, we need to employ computational fuzzy extractors that are not invertible by non-lossy functions.

This paper considers error-correction for information in array design, i.e., two-dimensional design such as QR-codes. The error model is multi deletion/substitution/erasure errors. Code construction for the errors and an application of the code are provided. The decoding technique uses an error-locator for deletion codes.

Approximate computing (AC) has recently emerged as a promising approach to the energy-efficient design of digital systems. For realizing the practical AC design, we need to verify whether the designed circuit can operate correctly under various operating conditions. Namely, the verification needs to efficiently find fatal logic errors or timing errors that violate the constraint of computational quality. This work focuses on the verification where the computational results can be observed, the computational quality can be calculated from computational results, and the constraint of computational quality is given and defined as the constraint which is set to the computational quality of designed AC circuit with given workloads. Then, this paper proposes a novel dynamic verification framework of the AC circuit. The key idea of the proposed framework is to incorporate a quality assessment capability into the Coverage-based Grey-box Fuzzing (CGF). CGF is one of the most promising techniques in the research field of software security testing. By repeating (1) mutation of test patterns, (2) execution of the program under test (PUT), and (3) aggregation of coverage information and feedback to the next test pattern generation, CGF can explore the verification space quickly and automatically. On the other hand, CGF originally cannot consider the computational quality by itself. For overcoming this quality unawareness in CGF, the proposed framework additionally embeds the Design Under Verification (DUV) component into the calculation part of computational quality. Thanks to the DUV integration, the proposed framework realizes the quality-aware feedback loop in CGF and thus quickly enhances the verification coverage for test patterns that violate the quality constraint. In this work, we quantitatively compared the verification coverage of the approximate arithmetic circuits between the proposed framework and the random test. In a case study of an approximate multiply-accumulate (MAC) unit, we experimentally confirmed that the proposed framework achieved 3.85 to 10.36 times higher coverage than the random test.

The approximate logarithmic multiplier proposed by Mitchell provides an efficient alternative for processing dense multiplication or multiply-accumulate operations in applications such as image processing and real-time robotics. It offers the advantages of small area, high energy efficiency and is suitable for applications that do not necessarily achieve high accuracy. However, its maximum error of 11.1% makes it challenging to deploy in applications requiring relatively high accuracy. This paper proposes a novel operand decomposition method (OD) that decomposes one multiplication into the sum of multiple approximate logarithmic multiplications to widely reduce Mitchell multiplier errors while taking full advantage of its area savings. Based on the proposed OD method, this paper also proposes an accuracy reconfigurable multiply-accumulate (MAC) unit that provides multiple reconfigurable accuracies with high parallelism. Compared to a MAC unit consisting of accurate multipliers, the area is significantly reduced to less than half, improving the hardware parallelism while satisfying the required accuracy for various scenarios. The experimental results show the excellent applicability of our proposed MAC unit in image smoothing and robot localization and mapping application. We have also designed a prototype processor that integrates the minimum functionality of this MAC unit as a vector accelerator and have implemented a software-level accuracy reconfiguration in the form of an instruction set extension. We experimentally confirmed the correct operation of the proposed vector accelerator, which provides the different degrees of accuracy and parallelism at the software level.