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Application-oriented papers provide an important way to invigorate and cross-pollinate the visualization field, but the exact criteria for judging an application paper's merit remain an open question. This article builds on a panel at the 2016 IEEE Visualization Conference entitled "Application Papers: What Are They, and How Should They Be Evaluated?" that sought to gain a better understanding of prevalent views in the visualization community. This article surveys current trends that favor application papers, reviews the benefits and contributions of this paper type, and discusses their assessment in the review process. It concludes with recommendations to ensure that the visualization community is more inclusive to application papers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the cloud computing for education (CCE) literature, and analyzes if the research is developing scientifically with adequate empirical validation. All aspects of empirical investigations covered in the literature are shown as weak, hence, the necessary scientific development of CCE requires extending its scope of interest, and involving scholars synergistically to create and maintain a “common research agenda.” Background: A need to develop research on CCE has been recognized, and considerable efforts made to create an accurate understanding of the development of its scope of interest, in terms of supporting pedagogical developments and processes for better quality of studies. Research Questions: This paper has three main aims: 1) to evaluate the scope of interest in the literature for CCE with specific reference to pedagogy and educational processes; 2) to analyze the characteristics of papers, specifically empirical studies, from the various points of view of the daily improvement activities of teachers and learners at all levels of education; and 3) to identify eventual research gaps to consider and stimulate new topics or further investigations. Methodology: This systematic mapping study review followed a rigorous, replicable process to collect and analyze representative studies of CCE. Findings: Differences are found across geographic areas in applying CCE infrastructure and technologies in educational institutions; few studies address CCE’s impact on pedagogic processes. The scope of interest in CCE is only partially covered; with empirical research being very shallow. Suggestions are made for more effective research on concerning the production and use of content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the influence of the stiffness and damping of real elastic shafts on the behavior of a multidrive system driving a tissue paper machine is investigated. The drive system consists of four dc motors, where two of them drive the Yankee drying cylinder and the other two drive the presses section. Six-pulse thyristor bridge power converters that are connected to the same power transformer supply the motors. The inertias of the motors and the driven machines, in conjunction with the shaft stiffness, form mechanical resonators. Thus, resonance phenomena may occur, which may lead to undesirable results. This particular case results to two three-mass and one five-mass systems. This paper presents an analysis of the resonance frequencies of two sections of the machine during startup and machine production, considering the shaft stiffness (shaft diameter, length, and thickness). The elastic shafts eliminate the ripple of the motor electromagnetic torque, which is transferred to the driven machine. The behavior of elastic shafts with different stiffness in the transmission system is studied. Moreover, the steady state and dynamic behavior of the system considering the influence of the elastic shafts and vibration analysis were investigated using simulation. A model algorithm for system simulation was developed using the MATLAB/SIMULINK software. Characteristic simulation results are presented and are expressed in terms of speed and torque response. Considering the resonance frequency analysis and simulation results, mechanical design guidelines can be given for the most significant drive components in order to avoid torsional oscillation resonance phenomena and minimize torsional oscillations of the drive system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

User interfaces to control networked household appliances are often inadequate. Either they are too simplistic or they are too complex and complicated relying on a PC-based interface. Therefore, a user interface that supports complex functionalities and is easy to use is required. In this article digital pen and paper are presented as a suitable interface. Digital pens are only marginally larger than their traditional counterparts, and digital paper is ordinary paper with an almost invisible unique pattern printed on it. Pen and paper are well known to users and thus an important barrier to the acceptance of networked appliances is removed. The approach is integrated with an Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) gateway, thus allowing for flexibility with respect to the protocol used to communicate with the appliance. It is also shown how the approach can be applied to other appliances in and beyond the home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on optimal approach to fault tolerant software system design.

An analysis of publications related to high energy physics computing in refereed journals is presented. The distribution of papers associated to various fields of computing relevant to high energy physics is critically analyzed. The relative publication rate of software papers is evaluated in comparison to other closely related physics disciplines, such as nuclear physics, radiation protection and medical physics, and to hardware publications. The results hint to the fact that, in spite of the significant effort invested in high energy physics computing and its fundamental role in the experiments, this research area is underrepresented in scientific literature; nevertheless the analysis of citations highlights the significant impact of software publications in experimental research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to provide a basis for the improvement of software estimation research through a systematic review of previous work. The review identifies 304 software cost estimation papers in 76 journals and classifies the papers according to research topic, estimation approach, research approach, study context and data set. A Web-based library of these cost estimation papers is provided to ease the identification of relevant estimation research results. The review results combined with other knowledge provide support for recommendations for future software cost estimation research, including 1) increase the breadth of the search for relevant studies, 2) search manually for relevant papers within a carefully selected set of journals when completeness is essential, 3) conduct more studies on estimation methods commonly used by the Software industry, and 4) increase the awareness of how properties of the data sets impact the results when evaluating estimation methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Computer and Software Applications Conference has celebrated its tenth anniversary in 1986. The conference has been very successful in attracting excellent papers and panels from both academia and industry. It continued the tradition and attracted superb papers for the following tracks: software quality, software engineering, software requirements, development environments, software techniques and knowledge-based systems.

The authors introduce The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), a publication that focuses on research software and its place in the scholarly publishing ecosystem. JOSSs goal is to make it easy for authors to publish a paper about their software, mostly focused on the software itself, and then be credited when this software is used based on users citing the JOSS paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on formal method for open object-based distributed systems (FMOODS). Object-based distributed computing is now a well-established technique for constructing large, heterogeneous computing and telecommunication systems. Standard bodies and consortia have defined distributed object-based frameworks as a foundation for open distributed computing. Its advent brings new challenge and opportunities for the use and development of formal methods. The FMOODS conference series has acted as a forum for presentation of research that addresses these challenges. It seeks to investigate how formal methods can be used to specify, develop and verify open object-based distributed systems. The objective of FMOODS is to represent work at the convergence of three important and related fields that is formal methods, distributed systems and object-based technology. The convergence represents some of the latest advances in the field of distributed systems and provides links between a number of important communities.

This paper integrates an estimation of distribution (EoD)-based update operator into decomposition-based multiobjective evolutionary algorithms for binary optimization. The probabilistic model in the update operator is a probability vector, which is adaptively learned from historical information of each subproblem. We show that this update operator can significantly enhance decomposition-based algorithms on a number of benchmark problems. Moreover, we apply the enhanced algorithms to the constrained optimal software product selection (OSPS) problem in the field of search-based software engineering. For this real-world problem, we give its formal definition and then develop a new repair operator based on satisfiability solvers. It is demonstrated by the experimental results that the algorithms equipped with the EoD operator are effective in dealing with this practical problem, particularly for large-scale instances. The interdisciplinary studies in this paper provide a new real-world application scenario for constrained multiobjective binary optimizers and also offer valuable techniques for software engineers in handling the OSPS problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper, “semQA: SPARQL with Idempotent Disjunction” [4], the authors study the RDF query language SPARQL. In particular, they claim that some of the results presented in [1] are not correct. In this note, we refute the claims made in [4], and actually show that some of the formal results of [4] are incorrect. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including the design of an optimal detector for multi-level flash devices, the use of distributed storage systems for data analysis and coding methods for cloud storage systems.

The Research Resource Identifier (RRID) was introduced in 2014 to better identify biomedical research resources and track their use across the literature, including key digital resources such as databases and software. Authors include an RRID after the first mention of any resource used. Here, we provide an overview of RRIDs and analyze their use for digital resource identification. We quantitatively compare the output of our RRID curation workflow with the outputs of automated text mining systems used to identify resource mentions in text. The results show that authors follow RRID reporting guidelines well, and that our natural language processing based text mining was able to identify nearly all of the resources identified by RRIDs as well as thousands more. Finally, we demonstrate how RRIDs and text mining can complement each other to provide a scalable solution to digital resource citation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the advantages of an electronic system Manuscript Central, a state-of-the-art Internet-based reviewing process. Adoption of the service by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; Capability of the system in enabling the entire peer-review process to take place online; Introduction of temc.manuscript central.com Web site.

Scientific software underpins a large and growing number of scientific discoveries and engineering advances. At the same time, it is a small portion of the total software produced, has little literature, or focus on improvement and community building relative to other, larger software domains. The Collegeville Workshop Series on Scientific Software provides a platform for scientific software teams and stakeholders to exchange information on the nature, challenges, and technical and cultural approaches to improve key elements of the scientific software enterprise. By soliciting white papers, posters, and tea-time themes, these workshops gather content to provide a three-day live event, plus recorded presentations and interviews that enable community members to learn from each other. The outcomes from the first two workshops, in 2019 and 2020, have provided a body of knowledge and experience that expands the size and recognition of software as an important part of the scientific enterprise. The 2021 workshop, focused on software teams, intends to further expand the conversation, and continue to build community around scientific software to improve its impact on science and engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nine papers in this special section focus on new developments in agile software and reports on applications for its use. A key aspect for the extensive use of agile software is that it supports developers with coping with the growing uncertainty and turbulence in technological and market environments. Feedback and change are at the core of Agile for a dynamic, evolving, and organic, rather than static, predefined, and mechanistic development process advocated by waterfall management. To create timely, high-quality, cost-efficient, and innovative solutions, Agile developers organized in small, colocated, autonomous teams, build and test software in rapid iterative cycles, actively involving users to gather feedback, updating the project scope, and plan "on-the-fly," using face-to-face communication as opposed to documentation. These papers contribute to the state-of-the-art of agile research by offering a rich, up-todate account of the dynamics occurring when expanding Agile into "not-just-software" contexts of the key challenges and perils related to the scaling and of the possible solutions to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a self-adaptive protection system is proposed for adjusting the time dial (TD) of reclosers found in electrical power distribution systems (EPDSs). The self-adjustment is carried out in both phase and ground protection. The methodology considers the fuses along the feeder to obtain the fuse-saving philosophy. This feature allows less interference on the protection system already implemented by the electrical power distribution utilities. This methodology also allows using other frameworks, such as the estimation of the fault distance. The software used for computer modeling and simulation was PSCAD™/EMTDC™. The flexibility provided by the method, which allows the incorporation of new logic and changes in decision-making, resulted in an adaptive method with a good performance against different locations, types, and fault impedance. It also resulted in better coordination between the protection devices (PDs). The results compared with well-coordinated conventional protection have shown significant performance gain with the adaptive system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an editorial that reflects on the author's role as editor-in-chief of the journal "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering." He remarks that the journal encourages those involved in the field of software engineering to submit manuscripts for publication. There is no longer a length limit to papers published in the journal. The reviewing process for submitted papers is discussed. The author discusses members of the journal's editorial board and offers his thanks to those who have helped in his role at the journal.

Commercial off-the-shelf microcontrollers can be useful for noncritical processing on spaceborne platforms. These microprocessors can be inexpensive and consume small amounts of power. However, the software running on these processors is vulnerable to radiation upsets. In this paper, we present a fully automated, configurable, software-based tool to increase the reliability of microprocessors in high-radiation environments. This tool consists of a set of open-source LLVM compiler passes to automatically implement software-based mitigation techniques. We duplicate or triplicate computations and insert voting mechanisms into software during the compilation process, allowing for runtime error correction. While the techniques we implement are not novel, previous work has typically been closed source, processor architecture dependent, not automated, and not tested in real high-radiation environments. In contrast, the compiler passes presented in this paper are publicly available, highly customizable, and are platform independent and language independent. We have tested our modified software using both fault injection and through neutron beam radiation on a Texas Instruments MSP430 microcontroller. When tested by a neutron beam, we were able to decrease the cross section of programs by $17-29\times $ , increasing mean-work-to-failure by $4-7\times $. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel nonintrusive protection scheme for fault classification of power transmission networks in a wide-area measurement system using fault information for decision making. The protection scheme is a noncommunication without global positioning system as it depends completely on locally measured currents for the nonintrusive fault monitoring (NIFM) using the power-spectrum-based hyperbolic S-transform (PS-HST). In this work, the HST is used to extract the high-frequency components of the current signals generated by an electric fault. To effectively select the HST coefficients (HSTCs) representing fault transient signals with increasing performance, a power spectrum of the HSTCs in different scales calculated by Parseval's theorem is proposed in this paper. Finally, back-propagation artificial neural networks and PS-HST are used to identify fault classes in power transmission networks. The proposed method is tested for different breaker on/off conditions by simulations using electromagnetic transients program software. The results obtained have proved that the proposed method is promising and demonstrate a high success rates and reliability for considering different fault resistances and inception times in NIFM applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the execution of a software system, tremendous amounts of data are recorded, and such data provide valuable information on software runtime behavior analysis. This paper presents an approach on how to utilize process mining as an enabler to discover software behavioral models. To achieve this, we formally define the software event log and its transformation from original software execution data. Essentially, a software event log consists of a set of cases that each is a manifestation of an independent software run. A case is represented as an ordered sequence of events that each refers to a method call. Given the observation that software usually has a hierarchical structure, we first propose an approach to construct a hierarchical software event log from the original flat one by the recursively applying method calling relation detection. Next, using extended process discovery techniques, we discover a software behavioral model, which is represented as a kind of hierarchical Petri net with components, from the hierarchical software event log. We have implemented the proposed approach in the open source process mining toolkit ProM. By using two synthetic software event logs, we show that our approach can deal with infrequent behavior. Moreover, a validation with one real-life software event log shows that our approach can help visualize actual software runtime behavior in an easy-to-understand manner. Note to Practitioners—Software data analysis techniques play an increasingly important role for understanding the real behavior of software systems. This paper addresses the issue of discovering behavioral models from real-life software execution data. A kind of hierarchical Petri nets is defined to represent the discovered software behavior. All proposed concepts and algorithms are supported by open source tools, and experiments over both synthetic and real-life software execution data have shown their applicability. The proposed methodology is readily applicable to industrial-size software behavior discovery problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The autonomous vehicles (AVs), like that in knight rider, were completely a scientific fiction just a few years ago, but are now already practical with real-world commercial deployments. A salient challenge of AVs, however, is the intensive computing tasks to carry out on board for the real-time traffic detection and driving decision making; this imposes heavy load to AVs due to the limited computing power. To explore more computing power and enable scalable autonomous driving, in this paper, we propose a collaborative task computing scheme for AVs, in which the AVs in proximity dynamically share idle computing power among each other. This, however, raises another fundamental problem on how to incentivize AVs to contribute their computing power and how to fully utilize the pool of group computing power in an optimal way. This paper studies the problem by modeling the issue as a market-based optimal computing resource allocation problem. In specific, we develop a software-defined network (SDN) architecture and consider a star topology where a centered AV outsources its computing tasks to the surrounding AVs for its autonomous driving. A market mechanism is developed in which the surrounding AVs sell their computing power at a cost based on their local idle computing resources. Then, we classify the tasks requested by the centered AV into two types which are task with time to live (TTL) and task without TTL, respectively. With different task types, we define corresponding cost models of the centered AV and formulate them as two minimization problems. The optimal solutions of the problems are achieved to guide the centered AV to wisely allocate computing tasks to surrounding AVs towards minimal cost. Finally, the performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated using simulations, which show that the proposed scheme can result in the guaranteed computing performance yet the lowest costs compared with other conventional schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Matthew J. Bridges on the automatic parallelization of non-numeric programs and another by Naveen Neelankantam on hardware atomicity.

In this paper, a simple energy-efficient physical layer modulation scheme termed as random number modulation (RNM) is proposed. It is a class of new systems that harness the randomness of pseudo random number generators (RNGs) for efficient communication, and adds a new degree of freedom to digital communication systems. It is also highly adaptable to high-rate, low-latency, and low-rate, high-energy efficiency scenarios. This paper includes a detailed system model, preliminary performance analysis, and extended discussions. The performance of the proposed system is analyzed in terms of symbol and block error probabilities, energy efficiency, and latency. It is shown that there is a fundamental tradeoff between the energy efficiency and the latency of the proposed system, and they can be easily software programmable allowing devices to adapt to different circumstances and environments rapidly. Based upon the basic system model herein, it is anticipated that more sophisticated RNM systems can be developed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The annotation of significant events within soccer videos is a fundamental step in content-based soccer video retrieval. In this paper, we propose a soccer video annotation approach based on semantic matching with coarse time constraints, where video events and external text information (match reports) are synchronized using their semantic correspondence in the temporal sequence. Unlike the state-of-the-art soccer video analysis methods that assume that the time of an event’s occurrence is given precisely by the external text information, this paper considers the problem of annotating soccer videos using match reports with coarse-grained time information. The contributions of the proposed approach are: 1) we propose a more generalized approach that synchronizes video events with text descriptions using high-level semantics with coarse time constraints, rather than assuming that the timestamp is given exactly in the text description; 2) the detection of event boundaries is improved by attack–defense transition analysis (ADTA); 3) a robust and fast center circle detection algorithm is proposed for the classification of soccer field zones and ADTA; and 4) unlike conventional audio-based whistle detection, we propose a novel Hough-transform-based algorithm from the perspective of image processing. This allows the game start time to be detected, and further helps the synchronization of video and text events. The experimental results conducted on a large number of soccer videos validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper deals with a mathematical model of a gas discharge arrester, developed within the Matlab/Simulink program environment on the basis of physical and mathematical parameters. The model includes important physical phenomena regarding a gas discharge arrester, such as its overvoltage causing triggering, discharge processes, electric arc, and a possible repeated dielectric breakdown in gas due to the heat released from the arc to the gas. This paper includes computations for the operating conditions of a gas discharge arrester connected to an ac circuit. The computing results are compared with those measurements of electrical quantities performed on a gas discharge arrester. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special section presents expanded versions of three of the best papers from the 11th Annual ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA 2012), which was held in Lausanne, Switzerland, from 29-31 July 2012. SCA has established itself as the premier conference dedicated specifically to innovations in the software and technology of computer animation. SCA 2012 received 80 submissions and each submission was reviewed by at least three members of the international program committee. After a thorough online discussion, the 72-member international program committee decided on the 27 full papers and nine short presentation papers accepted for the final program. Out of 27 full papers, the symposium's Best Papers Award Committee selected one best paper, two runner-ups, and four honorable mentions. The selection was informed by the original reviews and the conference presentations. We are delighted to present three out of the six very best papers of SCA 2012 invited for this special section. Each of the invited papers contains a minimum of 30 percent new material and received at least three reviews, including one reviewer not among the original SCA reviewers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics is a community of software users and user-developers who model physical processes in the Earth and planetary interiors. From 2010 to 2018, the community of researchers published upward of 638 peer-reviewed papers in more than 124 venues. We analyzed this corpus of publications to understand the impact of CIG workshops and tutorials, measured through software citation. We automated article analysis using text extraction and tokenization techniques. Patterns in co-mentioned software suggest that usage for some tools cross-cuts many domains, indicating their broad impact. Network analysis of coauthorship and participation in tutorials and hackathons reveal both are effective methods to grow software communities and the importance of developers in bridging research groups and expanding networks. Networks show that workshops broaden the reach of users beyond the developers while hackathons broaden the developer base creating greater collaboration opportunities for hackathon participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present hardware and software implementations of flexible polar systematic encoders and decoders. The proposed implementations operate on polar codes of any length less than a maximum and of any rate. We describe the low-complexity, highly parallel, and flexible systematic-encoding algorithm that we use and prove its correctness. Our hardware implementation results show that the overhead of adding code rate and length flexibility is little, and the impact on operation latency minor compared with code-specific versions. Finally, the flexible software encoder and decoder implementations are also shown to be able to maintain high throughput and low latency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Role assignment is a critical element in the role-based collaboration process. There are many constraints to be considered when undertaking this task. This paper formalizes the group role assignment problem when faced with the constraint of conflicting agents, verifies the benefits of solving the problem, proves that such a problem is a subproblem of the extended integer linear programming (x-ILP) problem, proposes a practical approach to the solution, and assures performance based on the results of experiments. The contributions of this paper include: 1) formalization of the proposed problem; 2) verification of the benefit achieved by avoiding conflicts in role assignment through simulation; 3) theoretical proof that conflict avoidance is a subproblem of the x-ILP problem that is nonpolynomial-complete; and 4) a practical solution based on the IBM ILOG CPLEX optimization package (ILOG) and verification of the scale of problems that can be solved with ILOG. The proposed approach is validated by simulation experiments. Its efficiency is verified by comparison with the previous exhaustive search-based approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In order to provide dynamic adaptation of the performance/energy tradeoff, systems today rely on heterogeneous multicore architectures (different micro-architectures on a chip). These systems are limited to single-ISA approaches to enable transparent migration between the different cores. To offer more tradeoff, we can integrate statically scheduled micro-architecture and use dynamic binary translation (DBT) for task migration. However, in a system where performance and energy consumption are a prime concern, the translation overhead has to be kept as low as possible. In this paper, we present Hybrid-DBT, an open-source, hardware accelerated DBT system targeting VLIW cores. Three different hardware accelerators have been designed to speed-up critical steps of the translation process. Experimental study shows that the accelerated steps are two orders of magnitude faster than their software equivalent. The impact on the total execution time of applications and the quality of generated binaries are also measured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time-of-flight positron emission tomography requires high timing resolution. In this paper, we determined the influence of scintillation properties on the detector timing resolution for crystals with non-negligible optical transit timespread. In addition to intrinsic scintillation properties, such as the light yield, decay time constant, and scintillation rise time, we also studied the relation between the timing resolution and extrinsic scintillation properties, such as the dimensions of the crystal, the absorption probability of the reflector, the dwell time of photons inside the reflector during the reflection process, and the crystal polish. For this purpose, we developed ray-tracing software. The crystals simulated in this paper are LSO:Ce, LYSO:Ce, LSO:Ce,0.2%Ca, LYSO:0.11%Ce,0.2%Mg, and LYSO:0.2%Ce,0.2%Ca, with dimensions 3 \times 3 \times 5~\mm^3, 3 \times 3 \times 10~\mm^3, 3 \times 3 \times 20~\mm^3, and 4 \times 4 \times 22~\mm^3. We furthermore studied the optical transit timespread of photons inside polished and etched crystals, which explains the differences in timing resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the first network-coded multiple access (NCMA) downlink system on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The use of UAV as a mobile aerial base station has received much attention in the 5G community in the context of highly mobile and flexible-configurable communication systems. As UAVs are limited by their flight time in the air, achieving high spectral and power efficiency while they are inflight is of great importance. Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising technique to increase the spectral and power efficiency. Conventional NOMA downlink that makes use of superposition coding in combination with successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoding does not work well in scenarios where the channel conditions of different downlink users are not readily available at the transmitter side. This is the case, for example, in the UAV scenario in which the UAV transmitter moves quickly, causing the channel conditions to vary in a very dynamic manner. This paper investigates a new NOMA downlink architecture, referred to asnetwork-coded multiple access. In the absence of channel information, an NCMA transmitter allocates equal power to the superposed signals of different downlink users. A key challenge is how to achieve high NOMA throughput under such equal power allocation. Toward this end, NCMA makes joint use of physical-layer network coding (PNC) and multiuser decoding (MUD) together with a new superposition coding scheme, referred to asNCMA-based superposition coding. In NCMA-based superposition coding, equal powers are allocated to the signals of different users, but a relative phase offset between the signals is introduced to optimize PNC and MUD decodings. To demonstrate the feasibility and advantage of the NCMA downlink, we implemented our designs on a software-defined radio and UAV. Our experimental results show that NCMA is robust against varying channel conditions. Moreover, the throughput of NCMA can outperform the state-of-the-art SIC-based superposition coding system and the time-division multiple access system by 50% and 80%, respectively, demonstrating that NCMA is a practical solution to boost throughput in UAV NOMA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the suitability of single-instruction multiple data (SIMD) extensions of current microprocessors under radiation environments. SIMD extensions are intended for software acceleration, focusing mostly in applications that require high computational effort, which are common in many fields such as computer vision. SIMD extensions use a dedicated coprocessor that makes possible packing several instructions in one single extended instruction. Applications that require high performance could benefit from the use of SIMD coprocessors, but their reliability needs to be studied. In this paper, NEON, the SIMD coprocessor of ARM microprocessors, has been selected as a case study to explore the behavior of SIMD extensions under radiation. Radiation experiments of ARM CORTEX-A9 microprocessors have been accomplished with the objective of determining how the use of this kind of coprocessor can affect the system reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security-sensitive usage models, such as implantable and wearable medical devices are prone to algorithmic cryptographic attacks as well as malicious implementation attacks. The cryptographic algorithms in these cryptosystems, such as lightweight block ciphers utilized in constrained applications, face significant tradeoff between the high level of security and the efficiency of their implementation metrics. For thwarting fault analysis attacks, among effective variants of active implementation attacks, and also to detect natural faults, efficient fault diagnosis schemes for these lightweight block ciphers are essential. In this paper, for the first time, we propose error detection schemes for lightweight block cipher, KLEIN, to ameliorate its error resiliency with low hardware complexity. The proposed fault diagnosis architectures are for linear and nonlinear components of this cipher. We also consider the notion of fault space transformation for lightweight cryptography and present its potential complications. The implementation of the proposed schemes through variants of Xilinx field-programmable gate arrays and the error coverage assessed with fault injection simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed schemes with acceptable footprints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thanks to relatively small public and secret keys, the Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation (SIKE) protocol made it into the third evaluation round of the post-quantum standardization project of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Even though a large body of research has been devoted to the efficient implementation of SIKE, its latency is still undesirably long for many real-world applications. Most existing implementations of the SIKE protocol use the Montgomery representation for the underlying field arithmetic since the corresponding reduction algorithm is considered the fastest method for performing multiple-precision modular reduction. In this paper, we propose a new data representation for supersingular isogeny-based Elliptic-Curve Cryptography (ECC), of which SIKE is a sub-class. This new representation enables significantly faster implementations of modular reduction than the Montgomery reduction, and also other finite-field arithmetic operations used in ECC can benefit from our data representation. We implemented all arithmetic operations in C using the proposed representation such that they have constant execution time and integrated them to the latest version of the SIKE software library. Using four different parameters sets, we benchmarked our design and the optimized generic implementation on a 2.6 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2690 processor. Our results show that, for the prime of SIKEp751, the proposed reduction algorithm is approximately 2.61 times faster than the currently best implementation of Montgomery reduction, and our representation also enables significantly better timings for other finite-field operations. Due to these improvements, we were able to achieve a speed-up by a factor of about 1.65, 2.03, 1.61, and 1.48 for SIKEp751, SIKEp610, SIKEp503, and SIKEp434, respectively, compared to state-of-the-art generic implementations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since modern cyber-physical power systems are vulnerable to coordinated wide-area cyber attacks, it is necessary to mitigate the potential risk as much as possible. At the planning stage, the defender can utilize software diversity, which is a common phenomenon that the cyber software of different substations comes from different competing vendors. Therefore, different kinds of software may not be exposed to the same zero-day security loophole, preventing the attacker from taking charge of multiple substations at the same time. In this paper, the optimal scheme of software deployment considering long-term risk mitigation is studied. Firstly, the framework of diversity-based cyber defense against malicious attacks is formulated. Secondly, the risk index based on representative attack patterns is constructed, which is the objective to be minimized. Thirdly, considering that the deployment scheme is long-term stable while the operating mode varies with time, we construct a multiobjective nonlinear stochastic programming to mitigate the average risk of operating modes. Then the optimization problem is solved by the multiobjective genetic algorithm. Lastly, results of the IEEE 39-node CPPS and and the Virtual European Grid demonstrate that the proposed method can considerably reduce the attack risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When tuning the parameters of a constrained model predictive controller (MPC), one usually will use closed-loop simulations in order to predict closed-loop performance. Closed-loop simulation can be very time-consuming and inconvenient fur large-scale constrained MPC, such as paper machine cross-directional (CD) predictive control. Paper machine CD processes are two-dimensional (2-D) (temporal and spatial) systems with up to 600 inputs and 6000 outputs. It is very important to predict the steady-state values for the closed-loop CD MPC systems during the tuning process, as the variances of these values are used as the control performance indexes in paper making industry. This article proposes to use a direct one-step static optimizer for approximating the closed-loop steady-state performance of constrained CD MPC. The parameters of this static optimizer can be obtained through minimizing the difference of two closed-loop transfer functions. Experiments with industrial data demonstrate that the static optimizer is computationally much more efficient (up to two orders of magnitude) than closed-loop simulation while reliably and accurately predicting the steady-state performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Call for Papers [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents an efficient method to calculate the magnetic forces on bodies in contact. The forces are computed through the local application of the virtual work principle on degenerated air-gap elements. The results from this method are compared with those from other software and validated with measurements on a permanent magnet setup. Not only is this technique very accurate, but it also reduces the computational burden related to the problematic meshing of thin layers. The implementation of this method in an open source finite element software having facilities for higher order elements and parallel computation unlocks a cost effective and effectual platform for an electromechanical computation of electromechanical devices and magnetic materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a novel methodology to reduce the effort in automating manual surface finishing processes by bridging the knowledge transfer gap of the manual operator's skills to a robot program. Key process variables (KPVs), i.e., contact force, tool path, and feed rate, of the manual operator performing the task are captured with a “sensorized” hand-held belt grinder, while the changes to the work-piece geometry is captured using a 3-D scanner. The entire manual tool-path strategy is segmented into its primitives or primary strategies before programming an equivalent robotic tool-path and strategy. The manual tool-path primitives are imported into computer-aided-manufacturing software where boundary splines are created to generate the robotic tool-paths. An analytical material removal rate (MRR) model is used to scale the extracted manual KPVs such that the parameters can be executed by the robotic platform, while still maintaining an equivalent material removal profile. In the first experimental trial with the designed robotic finishing strategy using this approach, the work-piece could be finished to within 0.7 mm of the desired shape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past ten years, human re-identification has received increased attention from the computer vision research community. However, for the most part, these research papers are divorced from the context of how such algorithms would be used in a real-world system. This paper describes the unique opportunity our group of academic researchers had to design and deploy a human re-identification system in a demanding real-world environment: a busy airport. The system had to be designed from the ground up, including robust modules for real-time human detection and tracking, a distributed, low-latency software architecture, and a front-end user interface designed for a specific scenario. None of these issues are typically addressed in re-identification research papers, but all are critical to an effective system that end users would actually be willing to adopt. We detail the challenges of the real-world airport environment, the computer vision algorithms underlying our human detection and re-identification algorithms, our robust software architecture, and the ground-truthing system required to provide the training and validation data for the algorithms. Our initial results show that despite the challenges and constraints of the airport environment, the proposed system achieves very good performance while operating in real time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we address identification of a class of multi-input single-output (MISO) linear time-invariant (LTI) discrete-time systems, where the MISO system is composed of several single-input single-output (SISO) LTI systems and only the sum of the output of each SISO system can be measured. By exciting one SISO system and employing periodic inputs to the remaining SISO systems, we decompose the MISO system into the excited SISO system where its input and output can be calculated from the measured data. As such, the original parameters for each SISO system can be estimated using the well-established identification techniques. The proposed method using periodic inputs is also extended to identification beyond the Nyquist frequency. Both simulation and experimental results on identification of actuators in the dual-stage hard disk drive are carried out to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]