ProcDef: Local‐to‐global Deformation for Skeleton‐free Character Animation

Animations of characters with flexible bodies such as jellyfish, snails, and, hearts are difficult to design using traditional skeleton‐based approaches. A standard approach is keyframing, but adjusting the shape of the flexible body for each key frame is tedious. In addition, the character cannot dynamically adjust its motion to respond to the environment or user input. This paper introduces a new procedural deformation framework (ProcDef) for designing and driving animations of such flexible objects. Our approach is to synthesize global motions procedurally by integrating local deformations. ProcDef provides an efficient design scheme for local deformation patterns; the user can control the orientation and magnitude of local deformations as well as the propagation of deformation signals by specifying line charts and volumetric fields. We also present a fast and robust deformation algorithm based on shape‐matching dynamics and show some example animations to illustrate the feasibility of our framework.     

Local dimming light‐guiding plate type backlight system using alignment‐controlled polymer‐dispersed liquid crystals

A new technology which enables a local brightness control according to the displayed images has been expected in the thin and lightweight backlight systems to improve a contrast ratio and power consumption of the liquid crystal displays (LCDs). In this paper, we have proposed a novel local‐dimming backlight system using alignment‐controlled polymer‐dispersed liquid crystals as a light‐guiding plate and investigated the forming conditions of polymer‐dispersed liquid crystals to achieve both a high‐luminance ratio and a fast response speed. As a result, we found that a luminance ratio and response speed of the backlight system can be improved by using bifunctional LC monomer materials and forming fine and rigid polymer network in the LCs, and achieved high luminance ratio of 16:1 and fast response time less than 0.5 ms. In addition, we fabricated the twisted nematic‐mode LCD using the local dimming light‐guiding plate‐type backlight based on this design, and successfully realized eight times higher contrast ratio than that of the traditional twisted nematic‐mode LCD.     

Interval Evaluations in the Analytic Hierarchy Process By Possibility Analysis

Since a pairwise comparison matrix in the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is based on human intuition, the given matrix will always include inconsistent elements violating the transitivity property. We propose the Interval AHP by which interval weights can be obtained. The widths of the estimated interval weights represent inconsistency in judging data. Since interval weights can be obtained from inconsistent data, the proposed Interval AHP is more appropriate to human judgment. Assuming crisp values in a pairwise comparison matrix, the interval comparisons including the given crisp comparisons can be obtained by applying the Linear Programming (LP) approach. Using an interval preference relation, the Interval AHP for crisp data can be extended to an approach for interval data allowing to express the uncertainty of human judgment in pairwise comparisons.     

Theoretical Study on Knight Shift and Nuclear Spin Relaxation Rate in the Charge Ordering State of the 1D Quarter-Filled Electron System

The magnetic susceptibility χ(T) in normal states of the quasi-one-dimensional (Q1D) superconductor is calculated by using the N-chain renormalization group technique developed newly. For temperatures above T _cross being of the order of the interchain hopping t┴, χ(T) of QID system agrees with that of one-dimensional systems. For temperatures below T _cross where the Fermi liquid state is expected, it is found that dχ(T)/dT>0 in contrast to the case of the normal Fermi liquid, i.e., dχ(T)/dT=0. The origin of such a “pseudo-gap like” behavior is discussed in terms of antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations.     

Wide-gap layered oxychalcogenide semiconductors: Materials, electronic structures and optoelectronic properties

Applying the concept of materials design for transparent conductive oxides to layered oxychalcogenides, several p-type and n-type layered oxychalcogenides were proposed as wide-gap semiconductors and their basic optical and electrical properties were examined. The layered oxychalcogenides are composed of ionic oxide layers and covalent chalcogenide layers, which bring wide-gap and conductive properties to these materials, respectively. The electronic structures of the materials were examined by normal/inverse photoemission spectroscopy and energy band calculations. The results of the examinations suggested that these materials possess unique features more than simple wide-gap semiconductors. Namely, the layered oxychalcogenides are considered to be extremely thin quantum wells composed of the oxide and chalcogenide layers or 2D chalcogenide crystals/molecules embedded in an oxide matrix. Observation of step-like absorption edges, large band gap energy and large exciton binding energy demonstrated these features originating from 2D density of states and quantum size effects in these layered materials.     

Growth and structure of heteroepitaxial thin films of homologous compounds RAO3(MO)m by reactive solid-phase epitaxy: Applicability to a variety of materials and epitaxial template layers

A reactive solid-phase epitaxy (R-SPE) method combines deposition of a thick amorphous or polycrystalline layer with a desired chemical composition and post-deposition solid-phase epitaxial growth. The solid-phase epitaxial growth is invoked by thermal annealing with an assistance of a sacrificial layer working as an epitaxial template. Thereby it enables us to grow high-quality epitaxial films of complex oxides whose epitaxial films are not grown by conventional high-temperature growth techniques. It was reported that 2-nm-thick ZnO layers worked as template for growing InGaO₃(ZnO)_m (m = integer) epitaxial films. The present study extended the R-SPE technique to growth of various complex oxides with chemical compositions of RAO₃(MO)_m and to use of various epitaxial template layers. We found that mono oxide epitaxial layers such as In₂O₃ and Ga₂O₃ work as template layers as well. Alternatively, a ZnO epitaxial layer is also applicable to ZnO-free compounds. The films obtained were grown heteroepitaxially on YSZ(111) and single-crystalline when the fabrication conditions are optimized.     

Improving the Performance of Feedforward Neural Networks by Noise Injection into Hidden Neurons

The generalization ability of feedforward neural networks (NNs) depends on the size of training set and the feature of the training patterns. Theoretically the best classification property is obtained if all possible patterns are used to train the network, which is practically impossible. In this paper a new noise injection technique is proposed, that is noise injection into the hidden neurons at the summation level. Assuming that the test patterns are drawn from the same population used to generate the training set, we show that noise injection into hidden neurons is equivalent to training with noisy input patterns (i.e., larger training set). The simulation results indicate that the networks trained with the proposed technique and the networks trained with noisy input patterns have almost the same generalization and fault tolerance abilities. The learning time required by the proposed method is considerably less than that required by the training with noisy input patterns, and it is almost the same as that required by the standard backpropagation using normal input patterns.     

An evaluation of an olfactory sensor and recognition system using metal-oxide semiconductor gas sensor with variable heater controller

An artificial olfactory, which is called an electronic nose system (e-nose), is studied for realizing new human–machine interface. The system consists of sensor unit and a signal processing unit. There are some types of sensors for the sensor unit, metal oxide semiconductor gas sensors (MOGS) and quartz crystal microbalance gas sensors are useful in our study. Our system in this paper has MOGS. Many of MOGS utilize an effect of an oxidation–reduction reaction on the surface of the sensors. One of the features of the sensor, the character of the sensor is changed by temperature of the sensors. In this paper, we build a extend output sensor unit using this feature, and show experimental result of classification applying multilayer perceptron. In the experiment, we choose soy sauce as classification targets because we are considering applying the system for management of cooked foods.     

Measurements of gamma-ray emission probabilities of 241, 243Am and 239Np

Gamma-ray emission probabilities of ^{241, 243}Am and ²³⁹Np have been precisely measured with gamma- and alpha-ray spectroscopic methods. The activities of the samples were determined by measuring alpha particles using a Si semiconductor detector. Gamma rays emitted from the samples were measured with a planar type High-Purity Germanium (HPGe) detector. An efficiency curve of the HPGe detector was derived with uncertainties from 0.7% to 2.5% by combining measured efficiencies and Monte Carlo simulation. The gamma-ray emission probabilities for the major gamma rays of these nuclides were determined with uncertainties less than 1.2%.