Propagation characteristics of a surface acoustic wave on a piezoelectric substrate depend on an adjacent medium. When the SAW is applied for a signal processing application of mobile communication systems, it is important to reduce the changes of the propagation characteristics. For a SAW sensor application, the changes are detected to determine physical and chemical properties of the medium. Gas- and liquid-phase sensors are realized by using the SAW device. Sensor sensitivities depend on the used piezoelectric materials. In this paper, first, we describe acoustic wave sensors. Then the detection mechanism and perturbation theories of the SAW sensors are explained. The sensor sensitivity is calculated by using the perturbation equations. Typical measurement systems are also explained. Moreover, several applications of the SAW sensors, such as results of gas sensors, liquid measurements, and immunoreaction measurements, are described.

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Information theory clarifies the theoretical limit of a coding problem on a given communication system by using the mathematical theory of information, and also establishes attempts to establish coding techniques that will achieve the theoretical limit. In recent years, Arikan has proposed a new class of codes,called polar codes, based on the polarization of a random process. The polar codes provably achieve the theoretical limit for communication systems with both stationary memoryless sources and binary input memoryless channels with low computational and space complexities. It is expected that polar codes will provide fundamental principles for encoding and decoding techniques with low computational and space complexities for various coding problems including multi terminal coding problems. In this paper, introduce polar codes based on polarization used for two typical communication systems with source coding or channel coding, and give an implementation of the polar codes in the C programming language.

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The compliance issues with respect to data protection and the right to privacy have been regarded as a very problematic and complex, and even unintelligible issue. In this paper, I will explain the precise difference between data protection and the right to privacy. Furthermore, I will focus on the raison d’etre of the management system regarding the protection of personal information by considering “privacy by design” (PbD) and “privacy impact assessment” (PIA). With regard to the correspondence of so-called “big data” usage to current legal schemes worldwide, I will introduce the MIC life-log handling principles and smartphone privacy guidelines. Finally, I will offer a solution to the current concerns of the Japanese data protection legal system that will appropriatery address to the above-mentioned issues.

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GPGPU, general-purpose computing on graphics processing units, has become a means of solving large and complicated problems. It is also expected to be used for LSI design and verification, which deal with large problems in this paper, we summarize the trend of the improvement in the computation time of LSI design using GPU from the following two viewpoints. The first is how the graphic processor GPU was developed, and how it has come to be used for general science computation. The second is how the capability of the GPU has increased and its application to large and complicated LSI design problems, now and in the future.

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