We discuss a new high performance computing service (HPCS) platform that has been developed to provide domain-neutral computing service under the governmental support from “EDucation-research Integration through Simulation On the Net” (EDISON) project. With a first focus on technical features, we not only present in-depth explanations of the implementation details, but also describe the strengths of the EDISON platform against the successful nanoHUB.org gateway. To validate the performance and utility of the platform, we provide benchmarking results for the resource virtualization framework, and prove the stability and promptness of the EDISON platform in processing simulation requests by analyzing several statistical datasets obtained from a three-month trial service in the initiative area of computational nanoelectronics. We firmly believe that this work provides a good opportunity for understanding the science gateway project ongoing for the first time in Republic of Korea, and that the technical details presented here can be served as an useful guideline for any potential designs of HPCS platforms.

View full abstract

A challenge faced by the video game industry is to develop believable and more intelligent Non-Playable Characters (NPCs). To tackle this problem a low-cost and simple approach has been proposed in this research, which is the development of a gossip virtual social network for NPCs. The network allows simple individual NPCs to communicate their knowledge amongst themselves. The communication within this social network is governed by social-psychological rules. These rules are categorized into four types: Contact, whether the NPC are within a contactable range of each other; Observation, whether the NPCs actually want to talk to each other based on their personal traits; Status, the current representation of the NPCs; and Relationships which determines the long term ties of the NPCs. Evaluations of the proposed gossip virtual social network was conducted, both through statistical analysis and a survey of real users. Highly satisfactory results have been achieved.

View full abstract

Light source estimation and virtual lighting must be believable in terms of appearance and correctness in augmented reality scenes. As a result of illumination complexity in an outdoor scene, realistic lighting for augmented reality is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a framework based on an estimation of environmental lighting from well-defined objects, specifically human faces. The method is tuned for outdoor use, and the algorithm is further enhanced to illuminate virtual objects exposed to direct sunlight. Our model can be integrated into existing mobile augmented reality frameworks to enhance visual perception.

View full abstract

Digital map systems can be categorized, based on the support they provide, into map navigation systems and map touring systems. Map navigation systems put more focus on helping travelers finding routes or directions instantly. By contrast, map touring systems such as Google Maps running on desktop computers are built to support users in developing their routes and survey knowledge before they go for travel. In this paper, traveler conceptual models are proposed as an interaction paradigm to enhance user immersion and interaction experience on map touring systems. A map touring system, MapXplorer, is also introduced as a proof of concept with its system design and implementation explained in detail. Twenty participants were invited to join the user study that investigates users' performance and preferences on navigation and exploration tasks. The results of experiments show that the proposed system surpasses traditional map touring systems on both navigation and exploration tasks for about 50 percent on average, and provides better user experience.

View full abstract

Due to the recent development of underlying hardware technology and improvement in installing environments, public display has been becoming more common and attracting more attention as a new type of signage. Any signage is required to make its content more attractive to its viewers by evaluating the current attractiveness on the fly, in order to deliver the message from the sender more effectively. However, most previous methods for public display require time to reflect the viewers' evaluations. In this paper, we present a novel system, called Mood-Learning Public Display, which automatically adapts its content design. This system utilizes viewers' involuntary behaviors as a sign of evaluation to make the content design more adapted to local viewers' tastes evolutionarily on site. The system removes the current gap between viewers' expectations and the content actually displayed on the display, and makes efficient mutual transmission of information between the cyberworld and the reality.

View full abstract

The last decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in research on human emotion modeling for generating intelligent virtual agents. This paper proposes a novel personality model based on the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R). Compared to the popular Big-Five-Personality Factors (Big5) model, our proposed model is more capable than Big5 on describing a variety of personalities. Combining with emotion models it helps to produce more reasonable emotional reactions to external stimuli. A novel Resistant formulation is also proposed to effectively simulate the complicated negative emotions. Emotional reactions towards multiple stimuli are also effectively simulated with the proposed personality model.

View full abstract

This study analyzes emotions established between people while interacting in face-to-face conversation. By focusing on empathy and antipathy, especially the process by which they are perceived by external observers, this paper aims to elucidate the tendency of their perception and from it develop a computational model that realizes the automatic inference of perceived empathy/antipathy. This paper makes two main contributions. First, an experiment demonstrates that an observer's perception of an interacting pair is affected by the time lags found in their actions and reactions in facial expressions and by whether their expressions are congruent or not. For example, a congruent but delayed reaction is unlikely to be perceived as empathy. Based on our findings, we propose a probabilistic model that relates the perceived empathy/antipathy of external observers to the actions and reactions of conversation participants. An experiment is conducted on ten conversations performed by 16 women in which the perceptions of nine external observers are gathered. The results demonstrate that timing cues are useful in improving the inference performance, especially for perceived antipathy.

View full abstract

This paper introduces a novel approach of feature description by integrating the intensity order and textures in different support regions into a compact vector. We first propose the Intensity Order Local Binary Pattern (IO-LBP) operator, which simultaneously encodes the gradient and texture information in the local neighborhood of a pixel. We divide each region of interest into segments according to the order of pixel intensities, build one histogram of IO-LBP patterns for each segment, and then concatenate all histograms to obtain a feature descriptor. Furthermore, multi support regions are adopted to enhance the distinctiveness. The proposed descriptor effectively describes a region at both local and global levels, and thus high performance is expected. Experimental results on the Oxford benchmark and images of cast shadows show that our approach is invariant to common photometric and geometric transformations, such as illumination change and image rotation, and robust to complex lighting effects caused by shadows. It achieves a comparable accuracy to that of state-of-art methods while performs considerably faster.

View full abstract

Curve extension is a useful function in shape modeling for cyberworlds, while a Ball B-spline Curve (BBSC) has its advantages in representing freeform tubular objects. In this paper, an extension algorithm for the BBSC with G²-continuity is investigated. We apply the extending method of B-Spline curves to the skeleton of the BBSC through generalizing a minimal strain energy method from 2D to 3D. And the initial value of the G²-continuity parameter for the skeleton is selected by minimizing the approximate energy function which is a problem with O(1) time complexity. The corresponding radius function of the control ball points is determined through applying the G²-continuity conditions for the skeleton to the scalar function. In order to ensure the radii of the control ball points are positive, we make a decision about the range of the G²-continuity parameter for the radius and then determine it by minimizing the strain energy in the affected area. Some experiments comparing our method with other methods are given. And at the same time, we present the advantage of our method in modeling flexibility from the aspects of the skeleton and radius. The results illustrate our method for extending the BBSC is effective.

View full abstract

Shadow mapping is an efficient method to generate shadows in real time computer graphics and has broad variations from hard to soft shadow synthesis. Soft shadowing based on shadow mapping is a blurring technique on a shadow map or on screen space. Blurring on screen space has an advantage for efficient sampling on a shadow map, since the blurred target array has exactly the same coordinates as the screen. However, a previous blurring method on screen space has a drawback: the generated shadow is not correct when a view direction has a large angle to the normal of the shadowed plane. In this paper, we introduce a new screen space based method for soft shadowing that is fast and generates soft shadows more accurately than the previous screen space soft shadow mapping method. The resultant images show shadows produced by our method just stand in the same place, while shadows by the previous method change in terms of penumbra while the view moves. Surprisingly, although our method is more complex than the previous method, the measurement results of the calculation time show our method is almost the same performance. This is because it controls the blurring area more accurately and thus successfully reduces multiplications for blurring.

View full abstract

A social network is a useful model for identifying hidden structures and meaningful knowledge among social atoms, which have complicated interactions. In recent years, most studies have focused on the real data of the social space such as emails, tweets, and human communities. In this paper, we construct a social network from literary fiction by mapping characters to vertices and their relationship strengths to edges. The main contribution of this paper is that our model can be exploited to reveal the deep structures of fiction novels by using graph theoretic concepts, without the involvement of any manual work. Experimental evaluation showed that our model successfully classified fictional characters in terms of their importance to the plot of a novel.

View full abstract

This paper proposes a novel multimodal interactive surgical simulator that incorporates haptic, olfactory, as well as traditional vision feedback. A scent diffuser was developed to produce odors when errors occur. Haptic device was used to provide the sense of touch to the user. The preliminary results show that adding smell as an aid to the simulation enhanced the memory retention that lead to better performance.

View full abstract

This paper presents our project of designing EdgeWrite text entry methods for Japanese language. We are developing a version of EdgeWrite text entry method for Japanese language: Katakana EdgeWrite. Katakana EdgeWrite specifies the line stroke directions and writing order of the Japanese Katakana character. The ideal corner sequence pattern of EdgeWrite for each Katakana character is designed based on its line stroke directions and writing order.

View full abstract

In this paper we present a cognitive architecture inspired on the biological functioning of the motor system in humans. To test the model, we built a robotic hand with a Lego Mindstorms™ kit. Then, through communication between the architecture and the robotic hand, the latter was able to perform the movement of the fingers, which therefore allowed it to perform grasping of some objects. In order to obtain these results, the architecture performed a conversion of the activation of motor neuron pools into specific degrees of servo motor movement. In this case, servo motors acted as muscles, and degrees of movement as exerted muscle force. Finally, this architecture will be integrated with high-order cognitive functions towards getting automatic motor commands generation, through planning and decision making mechanisms.

View full abstract

Fault localization is a necessary process of locating faults in buggy programs. This paper proposes a novel approach using dynamic slicing and association analysis to improve the effectiveness of fault localization. Our approach utilizes dynamic slicing to generate a reduced candidate set to narrow the range of faults, and introduces association analysis to mine the relationship between the statements in the execution traces and the test results. In addition, we develop a prototype tool DSFL to implement our approach. Furthermore, we perform a set of empirical studies with 12 Java programs to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The experimental results show that our approach is more effective than the compared approaches.

View full abstract

The rendering mechanism plays an indispensable role in browser-based Web application. It generates active webpages dynamically and provides human-readable layout through template engines, which are used as a standard programming model to separate the business logic and data computations from the webpage presentation. The client-side rendering mechanism, owing to the advances of rich application technologies, has been widely adopted. The adoption of client side rendering brings not only various merits but also new problems. In this paper, we propose and construct “pagelet”, a segment-based template engine for developing flexible and extensible Web applications. By presenting principles, practice and usage experience of pagelet, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of possible advantages and disadvantages brought by client-side rendering mechanism from the viewpoints of both developers and end-users.

View full abstract

Detecting a variety of anomalies caused by attacks or accidents in computer networks has been one of the real challenges for both researchers and network operators. An effective technique that could quickly and accurately detect a wide range of anomalies would be able to prevent serious consequences for system security or reliability. In this article, we characterize detection techniques on the basis of learning models and propose an unsupervised learning model for real-time anomaly detection in computer networks. We also conducted a series of experiments to examine capabilities of the proposed model by employing three well-known machine learning algorithms, namely multivariate normal distribution, k-nearest neighbor, and one-class support vector machine. The results of these experiments on real network traffic suggest that the proposed model is a promising solution and has a number of flexible capabilities to detect several types of anomalies in real time.

View full abstract

We propose a novel IDDQ outlier screening flow through a two-phase approach: a clustering-based filtering and an estimation-based current-threshold determination. In the proposed flow, a clustering technique first filters out chips that have high IDDQ current. Then, in the current-threshold determination phase, device-parameters of the unfiltered chips are estimated based on measured IDDQ currents through Bayesian inference. The estimated device-parameters will further be used to determine a statistical leakage current distribution for each test pattern and to calculate a and suitable current-threshold. Numerical experiments using a virtual wafer show that our proposed technique is 14 times more accurate than the neighbor nearest residual (NNR) method and can achieve 80% of the test escape in the case of small leakage faults whose ratios of leakage fault sizes to the nominal IDDQ current are above 40%.

View full abstract

A smoothing method for minimum phone error linear regression (MPELR) is proposed in this paper. We show that the objective function for minimum phone error (MPE) can be combined with a prior mean distribution. When the prior mean distribution is based on maximum likelihood (ML) estimates, the proposed method is the same as the previous smoothing technique for MPELR. Instead of ML estimates, maximum a posteriori (MAP) parameter estimate is used to define the mode of prior mean distribution to improve the performance of MPELR. Experiments on a large vocabulary speech recognition task show that the proposed method can obtain 8.4% relative reduction in word error rate when the amount of data is limited, while retaining the same asymptotic performance as conventional MPELR. When compared with discriminative maximum a posteriori linear regression (DMAPLR), the proposed method shows improvement except for the case of limited adaptation data for supervised adaptation.

View full abstract

We compared two audio output devices for augmented audio reality applications. In these applications, we plan to use speech annotations on top of the actual ambient environment. Thus, it becomes essential that these audio output devices are able to deliver intelligible speech annotation along with transparent delivery of the environmental auditory scene. Two candidate devices were compared. The first output was the bone-conduction headphone, which can deliver speech signals by vibrating the skull, while normal hearing is left intact for surrounding noise since these headphones leave the ear canals open. The other is the binaural microphone/earphone combo, which is in a form factor similar to a regular earphone, but integrates a small microphone at the ear canal entry. The input from these microphones can be fed back to the earphones along with the annotation speech. We also compared these devices to normal hearing (i.e., without headphones or earphones) for reference. We compared the speech intelligibility when competing babble noise is simultaneously given from the surrounding environment. It was found that the binaural combo can generally deliver speech signals at comparable or higher intelligibility than the bone-conduction headphones. However, with the binaural combo, we found that the ear canal transfer characteristics were altered significantly by shutting the ear canals closed with the earphones. Accordingly, if we employed a compensation filter to account for this transfer function deviation, the resultant speech intelligibility was found to be significantly higher. However, both of these devices were found to be acceptable as audio output devices for augmented audio reality applications since both are able to deliver speech signals at high intelligibility even when a significant amount of competing noise is present. In fact, both of these speech output methods were able to deliver speech signals at higher intelligibility than natural speech, especially when the SNR was low.

View full abstract

In this study, we introduce a system for tracking multiple people using multiple active cameras. Our main objective is to surveille as many targets as possible, at any time, using a limited number of active cameras. In our context, an active camera is a statically located pan-tilt-zoom camera. In this research, we aim to optimize the camera configuration to achieve maximum coverage of the targets. We first devise a method for efficient tracking and estimation of target locations in the environment. Our tracking method is able to track an unknown number of targets and easily estimate multiple future time-steps, which is a requirement for active cameras. Next, we present an optimization of camera configuration with variable time-step that is optimal given the estimated object likelihoods for multiple future frames. We confirmed our results using simulation and real videos, and show that without introducing any significant computational complexities, it is possible to use active cameras to the point that we can track and observe multiple targets very effectively.

View full abstract

In this paper, we propose a superpixel based depth map generation scheme for the application to monoscopic to stereoscopic video conversion. The proposed algorithm employs four main processes to generate depth maps for all frames in the video sequences. First, the depth maps of the key frames in the input sequence are generated by superpixel merging and some user interactions. Second, the frames in the input sequences are over-segmented by Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) or depth aided SLIC method depending on whether or not they have the depth maps. Third, each superpixel in current frame is used to match the corresponding superpixel in its previous frame. Finally, depth map is propagated with a joint bilateral filter based on the estimated matching vector of each superpixel. We show an improved performance of the proposed algorithm through experimental results.

View full abstract

The volumetric representations of deformable objects suffer from high memory and computational costs. In this work we analyze an approach of constructing low-resolution mass spring models (MSMs) on the basis of a high-resolution reference MSM. Preserving the physical properties of the modeled objects is emphasized such that their motion is consistent and independent of the spring network resolution. We varied the node merging algorithm and analyzed how various aspects of the simplification process affected the properties of the model and how these properties translated into visual behavior in a simulation.

View full abstract

This paper presents an experimental study that analyzes how conversational agents activate human communication in thought-evoking multi-party dialogues between multi-users and multi-agents. A thought-evoking dialogue is a kind of interaction in which agents act to provoke user thinking, and it has the potential to activate multi-party interactions. This paper focuses on quiz-style multi-party dialogues between two users and two agents as an example of thought-evoking multi-party dialogues. The experimental results revealed that the presence of a peer agent significantly improved user satisfaction and increased the number of user utterances in quiz-style multi-party dialogues. We also found that agents' empathic expressions significantly improved user satisfaction, improved user ratings of the peer agent, and increased the number of user utterances. Our findings should be useful for activating multi-party communications in various applications such as pedagogical agents and community facilitators.

View full abstract

Wireless patient monitoring is an active research area with the goal of ubiquitous health care services. This study presents a novel means of exploiting the distributed source coding (DSC) in low-complexity compression of ECG signals. We first convert the ECG data compression to an equivalent channel coding problem and exploit a linear channel code for the DSC construction. Performance is further enhanced by the use of a correlation channel that more precisely characterizes the statistical dependencies of ECG signals. Also proposed is a modified BCJR algorithm which performs symbol decoding of binary convolutional codes to better exploit the source's a priori information. Finally, a complete setup system for online ambulatory ECG monitoring via mobile cellular networks is presented. Experiments on the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database and real-time acquired ECG signals demonstrate that the proposed system outperforms other schemes in terms of encoder complexity and coding efficiency.

View full abstract

Non-Volatile Memories (NVMs) are considered as promising memory technologies for Last-Level Cache (LLC) due to their low leakage and high density. However, NVMs have some drawbacks such as high dynamic energy in modifying NVM cells, long latency for write operation, and limited write endurance. A number of approaches have been proposed to overcome these drawbacks. But very little attention is paid to consider the cache coherency issue. In this letter, we suggest a new cache coherence protocol to reduce the write operations of the LLC. In our protocol, the block data of the LLC is updated only if the cache block is written-back from a private cache, which leads to avoiding useless write operations in the LLC. The simulation results show that our protocol provides 27.1% energy savings and 26.3% lifetime improvements in STT-RAM at maximum.

View full abstract

Most existing outlier detection algorithms only utilized location of trajectory points and neglected some important factors such as speed, acceleration, and corner. To address this problem, we present a Trajectory Outlier Detection algorithm based on Multi-Factors (TODMF). TODMF is improved in terms of distance-based outlier detection algorithms. It combines multi-factors into outlier detection to find more meaningful trajectory outliers. We resort to Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) to optimize the number of factors when determining what factors will be considered. Finally, the experiments with real trajectory data sets show that TODMF performs efficiently and effectively when applied to the problem of trajectory outlier detection.

View full abstract

In this paper, we propose a new user-level file system to support block relocation by modifying the file allocation table without actual data copying. The key idea of the proposed system is to provide the block insertion and deletion function for file manipulation. This approach can be used very effectively for block-aligned file modification applications such as a compress utility and a TAR archival system. To show the usefulness of the proposed file system, we adapted the new functionality to TAR application by modifying TAR file to support an efficient sub-file management scheme. Experiment results show that the proposed system can significantly reduce the file I/O overhead and improve the I/O performance of a file system.

View full abstract

This paper proposes a QoS-aware differential processing control (QADPC) scheme for OpenFlow-based mobile networks. QADPC classifies the input packets to the control plane by considering end terminal mobility and service type. Then, different capacities are assigned to each classified packet for prioritized processing. By means of Markov chains, QADPC is evaluated in terms of blocking probability and waiting time in the control plane. Analytical results demonstrate that QADPC offers high priority packets both lower blocking probability and less waiting time.

View full abstract

With the development of personal electronic equipment, the use of a smartphone with a tri-axial accelerometer to detect human physical activity is becoming popular. In this paper, we propose a new feature based on FFT for activity recognition from tri-axial acceleration signals. To improve the classification performance, two fusion methods, minimal distance optimization (MDO) and variance contribution ranking (VCR), are proposed. The new proposed feature achieves a recognition rate of 92.41%, which outperforms six traditional time- or frequency-domain features. Furthermore, the proposed fusion methods effectively improve the recognition rates. In particular, the average accuracy based on class fusion VCR (CFVCR) is 97.01%, which results in an improvement in accuracy of 4.14% compared with the results without any fusion. Experiments confirm the effectiveness of the new proposed feature and fusion methods.

View full abstract

A new stock index trend analysis approach is proposed in this paper, which is based on a newly developed signal decomposition approach - adaptive Fourier decomposition (AFD). AFD can effectively extract the signal's primary trend, which specifically suits the Dow Theory based technique analysis. The proposed approach integrates two different kinds of forecasting approaches, including the Dow theory the RBF neural network. Effectiveness of the proposed approach is assessed through comparison with the direct RBF neural network approach. The result is proved to be promising.

View full abstract

Braille fonts allow us to easily make braille labels on capsule paper. For legibility, fonts should be printed at optimum sizes. To find the optimum sizes for Japanese braille fonts, we conducted an experiment in which a Japanese braille font was printed at various sizes on capsule paper and read and rated by young braille users. The results show that braille printed at 17 and 18 point sizes were read faster and evaluated higher than those printed at smaller or bigger sizes.

View full abstract

We present the adaptation of the acoustic models of hidden Markov models (HMMs) to the target speaker and noise environment using bilinear models. Acoustic models trained from various speakers and noise conditions are decomposed to build the bases that capture the interaction between the two factors. The model for the target speaker and noise is represented as a product of bases and two weight vectors. In experiments using the AURORA4 corpus, the bilinear model outperforms the linear model.

View full abstract

We propose a speaker adaptation method based on the probabilistic principal component analysis (PPCA) of acoustic models. We define a training matrix which is represented in a two-way array and decompose the training models by PPCA to construct bases. In the two-way array representation, each training model is represented as a matrix and the columns of each training matrix are treated as training vectors. We formulate the adaptation equation in the maximum a posteriori (MAP) framework using the bases and the prior.

View full abstract

For the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, a fast transform unit (TU) decision method is proposed. HEVC defines the TU representing a region sharing the same transformation, and it supports various transform sizes from 4×4 to 32×32 by using a quadtree of TUs. The various sizes of TUs can provide good coding efficiency, whereas it may dramatically increase encoding complexity. Assuming that a TU with highly compacted energy is unlikely to be split, the proposed method determines an appropriate TU size according to the position of the last non-zero transform coefficient. Experimental results show that this reduces encoding run time by 17.2% with a negligible coding loss of 0.78% BD-rate for the random-access scenario.

View full abstract

A novel fusion method for semantic concept detection in images, called tree fusion, is proposed. Various kinds of features are given to different classifiers. Then, according to the importance of features and effectiveness of classifiers, the results of feature-classifier pairs are ranked and fused using C4.5 algorithm. Experimental results conducted on the MSRC and PASCAL VOC 2007 datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method over the traditional fusion methods.

View full abstract

In our previous work, we proposed to combine ConceptNet and WordNet for Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). The ConceptNet was automatically disambiguated through Normalized Google Distance (NGD) similarity. In this letter, we present several techniques to enhance the performance of the ConceptNet disambiguation and use this enriched semantic knowledge in WSD task. We propose to enrich both the WordNet semantic knowledge and NGD to disambiguate the concepts in ConceptNet. Furthermore, we apply the enriched semantic knowledge to improve the performance of WSD. From a number of experiments, the proposed method has been obtained enhanced results.

View full abstract