Profile-Driven Component Placement for Cluster-Based Online Services

The growth of the Internet and of various intranets has spawned a wealth of online services, most of which are implemented on local-area clusters using remote invocation (for example, remote procedure call/remote method invocation) among manually placed application components. Component placement can be a significant challenge for large-scale services, particularly when application resource needs are workload dependent. Automatic component placement has the potential to maximize overall system throughput. The key idea is to construct (offline) a mapping between input workload and individual-component resource consumption. Such mappings, called component profiles, then support high-performance placement. Preliminary results on an online auction benchmark based on J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) suggest that profile-driven tools can identify placements that achieve near-optimal overall throughput.     

Special Effect Pigments Based on Silica Flakes

A new class of special effect pigments based on synthetically manufactured silica flakes coated with metal oxides was developed and introduced into the market. Silica flake pigments show extraordinary color effects such as improved interference and strong angle-dependent behavior. They can be used in automotive paints, industrial paints, plastics, and printing inks.     

Measurement and Identification of the Parameters of SPICE-Models of a Bipolar Transistor

A method of measuring and identifying the static parameters of a bipolar transistor is considered. The characteristic of the transistor, from which the parameters of the model are determined, is chosen depending on what group the calculated parameters belong to. The characteristics are measured in such a way that the equations of the model describing them can be reduced to the simplest form.     

Corrected Sum Rule, Generalized Virial Identity and Elementary Excitation Spectrum of Bose–Einstein Condensates at Any Trapped Atom Number

Using a corrected sum rule and a generalized virial identity, we study the analytical expression for entire modes of the collective elementary excitation spectrum in a trapped Bose–Einstein condensate at any atom number. Explicit analytical formulas for the spectrum are obtained for the harmonic traps with both spherical symmetry and axial symmetry using the gaussian approximation for the N-body ground-state wave function of the condensate. These formulas give the simple dependence of all energy levels on the atom numbers, their interaction strength and trap geometry parameters.     

Application of an anisotropic perfectly matched layer absorber for open boundary truncation in the multiresolution time domain scheme

We apply an anisotropic perfectly matched layer (APML) absorber for open boundary truncation in implementation of the multiresolution time domain (MRTD) scheme. We develop an APML update algorithm to handle a general APML region in the MRTD formulations with the content of the leapfrog algorithm applied in the conventional finite-difference time-domain method. We also discuss the boundary truncations for both perfectly electric conductor (PEC) and perfectly magnetic conductor (PMC) walls using the image techniques. We validate the algorithm by analyzing various guided wave and antenna structures. It is found that the APML performs well for absorbing electromagnetic waves in the MRTD algorithm.     

Optical-transmission characteristics of optical-fiber cables and installed optical-fiber cable networks for WDM systems

Many cables containing 1.3-/spl mu/m zero-dispersion single-mode (SM) optical fibers are installed in trunk and access networks. Recently, there have been a number of studies on wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) systems designed to increase transmission capacity and flexibility. If we can construct WDM systems using SM optical-fiber cable networks designed to transmit using wavelengths in the 1.3-/spl mu/m window (O-band), this will prove very effective in reducing construction costs. It is therefore important to examine the wavelength dependence of the transmission characteristics of SM optical-fiber cables and networks that have already been installed and in which several optical fibers are joined. In this paper, we describe the measured optical characteristics of SM optical-fiber cables and installed optical-fiber cable networks at various wavelengths. The optical characteristics were stable in the 1.46 to 1.625-/spl mu/m wavelength range and we confirmed that the installed SM optical-fiber cable networks could be used for WDM system applications.     

Microscale Patterning of Mesoscopic PZN-PT Single Crystal Films by Crystal ion Slicing and Laser-Induced Etching

Advances in the fabrication of solid-solution single crystal relaxor ferroelectrics have made it possible to produce highly efficient piezoelectric crystals, and have attracted renewed interest in the use of these crystals for a new generation of piezoelectric transducers, actuators and sensors. Of particular interest is their incorporation into micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS). In this paper we report on the laser-induced wet chemical etching of lead zinc niobate-lead titanate (PZN-PT) in hydrochloric acid (HCl). Argon-ion laser radiation at power levels up to 4 W is focused to a spot diameter of about 15μm and results in the chemical etching of grooves at patterning speeds up to 5μm/sec. Crystal ion slicing, an ion-implant-based film separation technique, is used in combination with laser etching to form 5 to 10μm-thick patterned and freestanding films for incorporation into micro-electromechanical devices.     

Chernoff bounds on pairwise error probabilities of space-time codes

We derive Chernoff bounds on pairwise error probabilities of coherent and noncoherent space-time signaling schemes. First, general Chernoff bound expressions are derived for a correlated Ricean fading channel and correlated additive Gaussian noise. Then, we specialize the obtained results to the cases of space-time-separable noise, white noise, and uncorrelated fading. We derive approximate Chernoff bounds for high and low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and propose optimal signaling schemes. We also compute the optimal number of transmitter antennas for noncoherent signaling with unitary mutually orthogonal space-time codes.     

Self-reflective segmentation of human bodily motions using recurrent neural networks

For realizing a naturalistic collaboration between the human and the robot, we have to establish the intention sharing from the series of motion data that are observed and exchanged between the human and the machine. In a word, this is a problem to detect "meanings" out of the digitized data stream. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on semiosis, and present a method of interpreting bodily motions using recurrent neural networks called Elman networks. We made some experiments using the raw data acquired while a human performs a simple task of fetching objects by stretching and folding his/her arm, and demonstrate that the network can learn invariant features of the generalized motion concepts, classify the motion by referring to self-organized memory structure, and understand a task structure of the observed human bodily motion. These capabilities are essential for machine intelligence to establishing the human-robot shared autonomy, a new style of human-machine collaboration proposed in the area of robotics.