Thermodiffusion‐Assisted Pyroelectrics—Enabling Rapid and Stable Heat and Radiation Sensing

Sensors for monitoring temperature, heat flux, and thermal radiation are essential for applications such as electronic skin. While pyroelectric and thermoelectric effects are suitable candidates as functional elements in such devices, both concepts show individual drawbacks in terms of zero equilibrium signals for pyroelectric materials and small or slow response of thermoelectric materials. Here, these drawbacks are overcome by introducing the concept of thermodiffusion‐assisted pyroelectrics, which combines and enhances the performance of pyroelectric and ionic thermoelectric materials. The presented integrated concept provides both rapid initial response upon heating and stable synergistically enhanced signals upon prolonged exposure to heat stimuli. Likewise, incorporation of plasmonic metasurfaces enables the concept to provide both rapid and stable signals for radiation‐induced heating. The performance of the concept and its working mechanism can be explained by ion–electron interactions at the interface between the pyroelectric and ionic thermoelectric materials.     

A Mixed Signal Fuzzy Controller Using Current Mode Circuits

A mixed analog-digital fuzzy logic inference processor chip, designed in a 0.35-μm CMOS technology, is presented. The analog fuzzy engine is based on a novel current-mode CMOS circuit used for the implementation of fuzzy partition membership functions. The architecture consists of a 3 inputs—1 output analog fuzzy engine, internal digital registers to store the parameters of the fuzzy controller, and a digital subsystem that allows the programmability of the fuzzy controller via an I ² C interface. The architecture, circuits, and some Cadence Spectre simulations are presented.     

On the impact of physical layer awareness on scheduling and resource allocation in broadband multicellular IEEE 802.16 systems [Radio Resource Management and Protocol Engineering for IEEE 802.16]

Multicellular networks based on the IEEE 802.16 standard appear to be very promising candidates to provide end users with broadband wireless access. However, they also pose interesting challenges in terms of radio resource management, where several design choices are not specified in the standard, intentionally left open to implementors. For this reason, we focus in this article on scheduling and resource allocation, and investigate how they could operate in a cross-layer fashion. In particular, we describe the principles of joint scheduling and resource allocation for IEEE 802.16 operating in AMC mode, and discuss the critical role played by physical layer considerations, especially intercell interference estimation and channel state awareness, in the obtained performance. This leads to identifying key open issues and possible general solutions     

A novel batch-based group key management protocol applied to the Internet of Things

Many applications for ad hoc networks are based on a point-to-multipoint (multicast) communication paradigm, where a single source sends common data to many receivers, or, inversely, on a multipoint-to-point communication paradigm, where multiple sources send data to a single receiver. In such scenarios, communication can be secured by adopting a common secret key, denoted as “group key”, shared by multiple communication endpoints. In this work, we propose a novel centralized approach to efficiently distribute and manage a group key in generic ad hoc networks and Internet of Things, while reducing the computational overhead and network traffic due to group membership changes caused by users’ joins and leaves. In particular, the proposed protocol takes advantage of two possible leave strategies: (i) at a pre-determined time selected when the user joins the group or (ii) at an unpredictable time, as in the case of membership revocation. The proposed protocol is applied to two following relevant scenarios: (i) secure data aggregation in Internet of Things (IoT) and (ii) Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs).     

A polyfluoroalkyl imidazolium ionic liquid as iodide ion source in dye sensitized solar cells

We report on the use of a fluorinated imidazolium ionic liquid as a source of iodide ions in solvent-based electrolytes for DSSCs. Efficient dye regeneration and fast charge transport in the fluorinated electrolyte result in an overall improvement of the device performances compared to conventional hydrogenated ionic liquids.     

Estimation of two-dimensional affine transformations through polar curve matching and its application to image mosaicking and remote-sensing data registration.

This paper presents a new and effective method for estimating two-dimensional affine transformations and its application to image registration. The method is based on matching polar curves obtained from the radial projections of the image energies, defined as the squared magnitudes of their Fourier transforms. Such matching is formulated as a simple minimization problem whose optimal solution is found with the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. The analysis of affine transformations in the frequency domain exploits the well-known property whereby the translational displacement in this domain can be factored out and separately estimated through phase correlation after the four remaining degrees of freedom of the affine warping have been determined. Another important contribution of this paper, emphasized through one example of image mosaicking and one example of remote sensing image registration, consists in showing that affine motion can be accurately estimated by applying our algorithm to the shapes of macrofeatures extracted from the images to register. The excellent performance of the algorithm is also shown through a synthetic example of motion estimation and its comparison with another standard registration technique.     

Towards high efficiency video coding: Subjective evaluation of potential coding technologies

This paper describes the details and the results of the subjective quality evaluation performed at EPFL, as a contribution to the effort of the joint collaborative team on video coding (JCT-VC) for the definition of the high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard. The performance of twenty-seven coding technologies has been evaluated with respect to two H.264/MPEG-4 AVC anchors, for high definition (HD) test material. The test campaign involved a total of 494 naive observers and took place over a period of four weeks. While similar tests have been conducted as part of the standardization process of previous video coding technologies, the test campaign described in this paper is by far the most extensive in the history of video coding standardization. A detailed statistical analysis of the subjective results is provided. The results show high consistency and support an accurate comparison of the performance of the different coding technologies.