Real-time database systems have the properties of database and real-time systems. This means they must keep timing constraints of transactions as required in real-time systems, and at the same time ensure database consistency as required in database systems. Real-time concurrency control is a general approach for resolving this conflict. In this type of control, a concurrency control technique for database systems is integrated with a task scheduling technique for real-time systems. This paper surveys previous studies on real-time concurrency control and considers future research directions.

We propose a new type of Graph Rewriting Systems (GRS) that provide a theoretical foundation for using the reduction method which plays an important role on analyze network reliability. By introducing this GRS, several facts were obtained as follows: (1) We clarified the reduction methods of network reliability analysis in the theoretical framework of GRS. (2) In the framework of GRS, we clarified the significance of the completeness in the reduction methods. (3) A procedure of recognizing complete systems from only given rewriting rules was shown. Specially the procedure (3) is given by introducing a boundary graph (B-Graph). Finally an application of GRS to network reliability analysis is shown.

In this paper, we will define Kleene-Stone logic functions which are functions F: [0, 1]ⁿ[0, 1] including the intuitionistic negation into fuzzy logic functions, and they can easily represent the concepts of necessity and possibility which are important concepts of many-valued logic systems. A set of Kleene-Stone logic functions is one of the models of Kleene-Stone algebra, which is both Kleene algebra and Stone algebra, as same as a set of fuzzy logic functions is one of the models of Kleene algebra. This paper, especially, describes some algebraic properties and representation of Kleene-Stone logic functions.

Kleene-Stone algebra is both Kleene algebra and Stone algebra. The set of Kleene-Stone logic functions discussed in this paper is one of the models of Kleene-Stone algebra, and they can easily represent the concepts of necessity and possibility which are important concepts for many-valued logic systems. Main results of this paper are that the followings are clarified: a necessary and sufficient condition for a function to be a Kleene-Stone logic function and a formula representing the number of n-variable Kleene-Stone logic functions.

With rapid increase of information requirements from various application areas, there has been much research on the efficient information retrieval. A signature is an abstraction of information, and has been applied in many proposals of information retrieval systems. In this paper we evaluate the performance of various signature-based information retrieval methods and provide guidelines for the most effective usage to a given operational environment. We derive analytic performance evaluation models of these access methods based on retrieval time, storage overhead and insertion time. The relationships between various performance parameters are thoroughly investigated. We also perform simulation experiments by using wide range of parameter values and show that the performance experiments agree with those analytic models.

Compared to multi-level signature file techniques, PSF (Partitioned Signature File) technique has less processing overhead by its characteristics of a simple file organization. In a multi-processor environment, the PSF technique also has an advantage that queries can be processed in parallel effectively by allocating one or more partitions to each processor. Main point of the PSF technique is a partitioning scheme based on a key selection. In this paper, an n-BFK (n-Bounded Floating Key) partitioning scheme is proposed, in which the number of segments for a key selection is bounded by n. The cost model is developed for the performance evaluation of the proposed scheme. By performance comparison with the existing schemes, the efficiencies of the proposed scheme are shown with respect to a disk access cost, a signature reduction ratio, and an uniformity of workload.

In this paper, optimal static load balancing in a tree hierarchy network that consists of a set of heterogeneous host computers is considered. It is formulated as a nonlinear optimization problem. We study the effects of the link communication time on the optimal link flow rate (i.e., the rate at which a node forwards jobs to other nodes for remote processing), the optimal node load (i.e., the rate at which jobs are processed at a node), and the optimal mean response time, by parametric analysis. We show that the entire network can be divided into several independent sub-tree networks with respect to the link flow rates and node loads. We find that the communication time of a link has the effects only on the link flow rates and the loads on nodes that are in the same sub-tree network. The increase in the communication time of a link causes the decrease in the link flow rates of its descendant nodes, its ancestor nodes and itself, but causes the increase in the link flow rates of other nodes in the same sub-tree network. It also causes the increase in the loads of its descendant nodes and itself, but causes the decrease in the loads of other nodes in the same sub-tree network. In general, it causes the increase in the mean response time.

A typical fault-tolerance technique of systolic arrays is to include redundant processors and links so that the array is reconfigurable when some processors fail. Another typical technique is to implement each processor by a majority voter and N (N3) copies of processors so that the faults of up to N-2 copies of processors can be masked without reconfiguration. This paper proposes a systolic linear array called reconfigurable modular redundant linear array (RMA) that combines these techniques with N4. When up to 2 copies of each processor fail in RMA, the faults can be masked without reconfiguration. When some voters or more than 2 copies of a processor fail, RMA can be reconfigured by specifying a new switch pattern. In order to perform reconfiguration efficiently, we present a reconfiguration algorithm with time complexity O (n), where n is the number of processors in RMA.

This paper proposes a new speaker adaptation method using a speaker weighting technique for multiple reference speaker training of a hidden Markov model (HMM). The proposed method considers the similarities between an input speaker and multiple reference speakers, and use the similarities to control the influence of the reference speakers upon HMM. The evaluation experiments were carried out through the/b, d, g, m, n, N/phoneme recognition task using 8 speakers. Average recognition rates were 68.0%, 66.4%, and 65.6% respectively for three test sets which have different speech styles. These were 4.8%, 8.8%, and 10.5% higher than the rates of the spectrum mapping method, and also 1.6%, 6.7%, and 8.2% higher than the rates of the multiple reference speaker training, the supplemented HMM. The evaluation experiments clarified the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This paper describes a new supervised speaker adaptation method based on vector field smoothing, for small size adaptation data. This method assumes that the correspondence of feature vectors between speakers can be viewed as a kind of smooth vector field, and interpolation and smoothing of the correspondence are introduced into the adaptation process for higher adaptation performance with small size data. The proposed adaptation method was applied to discrete HMM based speech recognition and evaluated in Japanese phoneme and phrase recognition experiments. Using 10 words as the adaptation data, the proposed method produced almost the same results as the conventional codebook mapping method with 25 words. These experiments clearly comfirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method.

A method for the recognition of Arabic printed scripts entered from an image scanner is presented. The method uses the Hough transformation (HT) to extract features, Dynamic programming (DP) matching technique, and a topological classifier to recognize the characters. A process of characters recognition is further divided into four parts: preprocessing, segmentation of a word into characters, features extraction, and characters identification. The preprocessing consists of the following steps: smoothing to remove noise, baseline drift correction by using HT, and lines separation by making an horizontal projection profile. After preprocessing, Arabic printed words are segmented into characters by analysing the vertical and the horizontal projection profiles using a threshold. The character or stroke obtained from the segmentation process is normalized in size, then thinned to provide it skeleton from which features are extracted. As in the procedure of straight lines detection, a threshold is applied to every cell and those cells whose count is greater than the threshold are selected. The coordinates (R, θ) of the selected cells are the extracted features. Next, characters are classified in two steps: In the first one, the character main body is classified using DP matching technique, and features selected in the HT space. In the second one, simple topological features extracted from the geometry of the stress marks are used by the topological classifier to completely recognize the characters. The topological features used to classify each type of the stress mark are the width, the height, and the number of black pixels of the stress marks. Knowing both the main group of the character body and the type of the stress mark (if any), the character is completely identified.

A new method for interpolating boundary function values and first derivatives of a triangle is presented. This method has a relatively simple construction and involves no compatibility constraints. The polynomial precision set of the interpolation function constructed includes all the cubic polynomial and less. The testing results show that the surface produced by the proposed method is better than the ones by weighted combination schemes in both of the fairness and preciseness.

This paper discusses the conversion of spatial resolution (pixel density) and amplitude resolution (levels of brightness) for multilevel images. A source image is sampled by an image scanner or a video camera, and a converted image is printed by a printer with the capability of higher spatial but lower amplitude resolution than the image input device. In the proposed method, the impulse response of the scanner sensor is modeled to obtain pixel values from the convolution of the impulse and the image signal. Discontinuous areas (edge) of the original image are detected locally according to the impulse model and neighbouring pixel values. The edge route is estimated which gives the pixel values for the output resolutions. Comparison of the proposed method with two conventional methods, reciprocal distance weight interpolation and pixel replication, shows higher edge quality for the proposed method.

An adaptive restoration algorithm is developed for binary images degraded nonadditively with flip noises. The true image is assumed to be a realization of a Markov Random Field (MRF) and the nonadditive flip noises are assumed to be statistically independent and asymmetric. Using the Expectation and Maximization (EM) method and approximating the Baum's auxiliary function, the degraded image is restored iteratively. The algorithm is implemented as follows. First, the unknown parameters and the true image are guessed or estimated roughly. Second, using the true image estimate, the Baum's auxiliary function is approximated and then the noise and MRF parameters are reestimated. To reestimate the MRF parameters the Maximum Pseudo-likelihood (MPL) method is used. Third, using the Iterated Conditional Modes (ICM) method, the true image is reestimated. The second and third steps are carried out iteratively until by some ad hoc criterion a critical point of EM algorithm is approximated. A number of simulation examples are presented which show the effectiveness of the algorithm and the parameter estimation procedures.

Surface construction is known as a way to visualize volume data. Although currently used algorithms such as marching cubes have good enough quality for volume visualization, they do not ensure adequate surface topology. These algorithms work well when the surface is rather simple. While when complicated, the surface does not separate the internal and external spaces, that is, there exist some holes on the surface, or exist redundant overlaps or self-intersection. Actually, adequate surface topology is important not only for visualization but for laser stereolithography, which creates real 3D plastic objects. In the present paper, we propose a new method that produces a set of triangular patches from a given volume data. The fact that the set of patches has no holes, no redundancy, no self-intersection, and has orientable closed surface topology is shown.

An information retrieval system based on a dynamic thesaurus was developed utilizing the connectionist approach. The dynamic thesaurus consists of nodes, which represent each term of a thesaurus, and links, which represent the connections between nodes. Term information that is automatically extracted from user's relevant documents is used to change node weights and generate links. Thus, node weights and links reflect a user's interest. A document retrieval experiment using the dynamic thesaurus was conducted in which both a high recall rate and a high precision rate were achieved.

In general, the work on developing an expert system has relied on domain experts to provide all domain-specific knowledge. The method for acquiring knowledge directly from experts is inadequate in oriental medicine because it is hard to find an appropriate expert and the development cost becomes too high. Therefore, we have developed two effective methods for acquiring knowledge indirectly from sample cases. One is to refine a constructed knowledge base by using sample cases. The other is to train a neural network by using sample cases. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods, we have implemented two prototype systems; the Oriental Medicine Expert System (OMES) and the Oriental Medicine Neural Network (OMNN). These systems have been compared with the system with the knowledge base built directly by domain experts (OLDS). Among these systems, OMES are considered to be superior to other systems in terms of performances, development costs, and practicalness. In this paper, we present our methods, and describe our experimental and comparison results.

Let C{c₁, , c_m} be a family of subsets of a finite set S{1, , n}, a subset S of S is a co-hitting set if S contains no element of C as a subset. By using an O((log n)²) time EREW PRAM algorithm for a maximal independent set problem (MIS), we show that a maximal co-hitting set for S can be computed on an EREW PRAN in time O(αβ(log(nm))²) using O(n² m) processors, where αmax{|c_ii1, , n} and βmax{|d_jj1, , n} with d_j{c_i|jc_i}. This implies that if αβO((log(nm))^k) then the problem is solvable in NC.

An optimal algorithm for decomposing a special type of the Hasse diagram into a minimum set of disjoint paths is described. It is useful for testing the consistency of functional dependencies.

Marc Kellner proposed an example problem intending to compare modeling and describing techniques of software process. In this paper, we will describe our approach to understanding and describing the problem, from a process/product relation view, and synchronization/concurrent view. Also, we will show that a description of the problem is translated for execution and its correctness is validated.

The research for rational quadratic Bézier curve and its applications for generating conics and curve-fitting have been reported in some papers. But rational cubic Bézier curves, for the complexity of computation of the weight parameters and the difficulty of the shape control, have very rarely been applied up to the present. In this letter, we proposed a new method to generate a rational cubic Bézier curve. For a given point S (assuming the curve pass it) and a given value of the intermediate variable t in the point, we can compute the weight parameters of the rational cubic Bézier curve according to the relation of the control polygon and the given point, and can generate the curve. Then we explained the relation among shape of curve, given point S and intermediate varisble t. As the samples of using the method, we showed the generation of the gear-shape curve, symmetrical curve and spindle-shape curve, etc.. Finally, we discuss the application of this method for curve-fitting.