This paper attempts to look at the forces that are acting in guiding the development of the future network. It argues that the path of progress will be an evolutionary one. The paper concluded on an optimistic note that "the future dream network will make the productivity per capita grow to the point when an improved quality of life both socially and politically can be realized".

This article briefly looks at the future of telecommunication education in the universities as it evolves from present concerns and trends. Five year bachelor's programs and top-down curricular design will be common. Textbooks supplemented by advance organizers, instruction and testing according to individual learning styles and global integration of education using multi-media services and broadband technology will be some of the other features. Finally, the importance of industry-university partnership in all aspects of engineering education is emphasized.

This paper describes the future perspective of automatic telephone interpretation using a multimedia intelligent communication network. The need for language interpretation over a telecommunication system creates a strong drive toward integrating information modalities for voice, image, data, computation and conferencing into modern systems using the capability of language interpretation. An automatic telephone interpretation system will solve the problems of language differences in international human-to-human communication. The future prospective of advanced multimedia language communication will be stated as the versatile application of an integrated intelligent network.

This paper discusses new trends and directions in human interface (HI) technologies, and the effects of HI technologies on human life or on social activities. This paper postulates that the HI subsumes man-machine interface, human-computer interaction, human-human interaction, human-organizational interface, human-environmental interface, human-social interface, etc. A new communication model, called Human Interface Communication Model (HICOM), and a new human dialogue model, called Human Interface Dialogue model (HIDIM), are derived by reexamining trends and directions on HI technologies from the viewpoint of functional meanings of interfaces, and from the viewpoint of a socially distributed cognition mechanism.

A fast Viterbi decoding technique with path reduction in optical channels is presented. This decoding exploits the asymmetric characteristic of optical channels. In the decoding trellis, the branches with low or no possibility being correct path are eliminated based on the detected signal level. The number of Add-Compare-Select (ACS) operations which occupy the dominant part of Viterbi decoding is considerably reduced due to branch eliminations, and fast decoding is realized by decoding asynchronously to received sequence. The reduction of the number of ACS operations is derived for the codes with rate 1/2. It is shown that the number of ACS operations is considerably reduced compared with the conventional Viterbi decoding. The bit error probability of the proposed decoding is derived for noiseless photon counting channel. It is also shown that the decoding technique can be applied to the cases using avalanche photo diode (APD) based receiver with dark current noise at a cost of negligible degradation on the bit error probability.

This paper describes a new configuration and control method for an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) with a bidirectional cycloconverter. When commercial AC power is operating normally, the load is supplied by commercial AC power and the bidirectional cycloconverter operates as a battery charger. During interruptions of commercial AC power, the bidirectional cycloconverter operates as an inverter and supplies AC power to the load. Unlike a conventional UPS, this new configuration does not require a battery charger, so it can be small, light-weight, cost-effective, and highly efficient. The output voltage characteristics and the transient voltage drop in the output when commercial AC power fails are also discussed by numerical analysis and experiments.

A rigorous theoretical method for predicting "ratio of desired signal power to interference power [c/i]" and "ratio of signal power to noise plus interference power [c/(n+i)]" where both desired and interference signals vary with time under the Nakagami-Rice fading conditions is presented. An alternative simple prediction method which is more desirable from the viewpoint of engineering application is then proposed. Prediction errors given by the simple method are evaluated by comparing to the errors given by the rigorous method, and it is confirmed that the simple method gives reasonable accuracy. This method is expected to serve in the development of frequency re-use technologies and the coordination of various systems for mobile satellite communications in the near future.

Electromagnetic interference on a bus wiring configuration of the ISDN basic interface using metallic telecommunication lines is studied. A simple circuit to simulate terminal equipment unbalance about earth is developed for measurement purposes, based on the fact that the unbalance weakens the withstanding capability against interference. The electromagnetic interferences from low-voltage supply lines, analog telephone lines and broadcasting waves are evaluated by experiments using the circuit. The interference is measured by both induced voltage on the interface line and the error rate of the transmission signal line. Consequently, it is clarified that the basic interface is disturbed by the induced voltage, because the terminal equipment in the CCITT Recommendation I.430 has too large an unbalance about earth to maintain transmission quality. Adding to this, countermeasures to reduce interference are proposed.